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ANCIENT INDIA 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

^orihon: FETTER LANE, E.G. 

C. F. CLAY, Manager 




(Siintmrfih : loo PRINCES STREET 

Sttlin : A. ASHER AND CO. 

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■Sioronto: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd. 

■SoftBO: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA 



A// rights reservtd 



TLATE I. 







oo 



o 

o 

oi 
>< 

a! 



ANCIENT INDIA 

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES 
TO THE FIRST CENTURY A.D. 

^^ BY 

E/'j. RAPSON, M.A. 

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
AND FELLOW OF ST JOHN'S COLLEGE 



fVITH SIX ILLUSTRATIONS 
AND TIVO MAPS 



Cambridge : 

at the University Press 
1914 



I'irst Edition I914 
Reprinted 1 9 14 






PREFACE 

In the following pages I have tried to write the 
story of Ancient India in a manner which shall be 
intelligible to all who take an interest in Modern 
India. My object has been to draw as clearly as 
possible the outlines of the history of the nations 
of India, so far as it has yet been recovered from 
the ancient literatures and monuments, and to 
sketch the salient features of the chief religious 
and social systems which flourished during the 
period between the date of the Rig-veda (about 
1 200 B.C.) and the first century a.d. 

For the benefit of those who wish to continue 
the study I have added at the end of the book 
some notes on the ancient geography and a short 
bibliography of standard works. 

In the transliteration of Sanskrit names I have 
followed a system which, while giving a strictly 
accurate representation of sounds, will, I trust, not 
puzzle readers who are not oriental scholars. If 
the vowels are pronounced as in Italian, with due 



VI 



PREFACE 



attention to long and short (e and o being in- 
variably long), the result will be sufficiently- 
satisfactory for all practical purposes. Modern 
place-names are spelt as in the Imperial Gazetteer 
of India (new edition). 

I am indebted to my friend, Dr F. W. Thomas, 
the Librarian of the India Office, for his kindness 
in obtaining for me permission to reproduce the 
illustrations, which are taken from negatives in 
the possession of the India Office. 

To my wife, to Miss Mary Fyson, and to the 
Rev. C. Joppen, S.J., I owe my best thanks for 
much valuable assistance in reading proofs and in 
compiling the index. 

E. J. RAPSON 

St John's College 

Cambridge 
i']th February 19 14 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. The Sources of the History of Ancient India i 

II. The Civilizations of India .... 24 

III. The Period of the Vedas .... 36 

IV. The Period of the Brahmanas and Upanishads 52 

V. The Rise of Jainism and Buddhism . . 64 

VI. The Indian Dominions of the Persian and 

Macedonian Empires . . . . 78 

VII. The Maurya Empire ..... 99 

VIII. India after the Decline of the Maurya 

Empire . . . . . . .113 

IX. The Successors of Alexander the Great . 122 

X. Parthian and Scythian Invaders . . .136 

Notes on the Illustrations . . .149 

Notes on the Ancient Geography of India 159 

Short Bibliography . . . . .176 

Outlines of Chronology . . . , 181 

Index 187 



Vll 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Plate I. The Girnar Rock in 1869 . . Frontispiece 

Plate II. Coins of Ancient India . Facing p, 18 

Plate III. The Besnagar Column . . . « 134 

Plate IV. The Mathura Lion-Capital . „ 142 

Plate V. Inscriptions on the Girnar Rock and 

on THE Mathura Lion-Capital . „ 150 

Plate VI. Inscriptions on the Besnagar Column „ 157 

MAPS 

N.W. India and the adjacent Countries in the 

time of Alexander the Great Between pp. 78 and']() 

The Principal Countries of Ancient India . At the end 



vih 



ANCIENT INDIA 



CHAPTER I 

THE SOURCES OF THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT 

INDIA 

The * discovery' of Sanskrit — The Indo-European family of 
languages — The languages and literatures of Ancient India 
— Alphabets — Inscriptions and Coin-legends — Chronology 
— The rise of Jainism and Buddhism. 

'^The Sanscrit language, whatever be its 
antiquity, is of a wonderful structure ; more 
perfect than the Greek, more copious than the 
Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either : 
yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both 
in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, 
than could possibly have been produced by 
accident ; so strong indeed, that no philologer 
could examine them all without believing them to 
have sprung from some common source^ which perhaps 
no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though 
not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the 
Gothick and the Celtick^ though blended with a very 
different idiom, had the same origin with the 
A i 



2 ANCIENT INDIA 

Sanscrit ; and the old Persian might be added to 
the same family." 

This pronouncement, made by Sir William 
Jones as President of the Asiatic Society of 
Bengal in the year 1786, may truly be called 
^ epoch-making,' for it marks the beginning of 
the historical and scientific study of languages. 

At the time when Sir William Jones spoke 
these words, the recent discovery — or rather the 
recent revelation to Western eyes — of the exist- 
ence in India of an ancient classical literature, 
written in a language showing the closest affinity 
to the classical languages of Ancient Greece and 
Rome, had raised a problem for which it was 
necessary to find some rational solution. How 
was the affinity of Sanskrit to Greek and Latin 
and other European languages to be explained.'* 
Scholars at the end of the eighteenth and the 
beginning of the nineteenth centuries were in- 
clined to see in Sanskrit the parent language 
from which all the others were derived. It was 
only after the lapse of a generation that the view 
propounded by Sir William Jones began to prevail. 
The correctness of his conception of an Indo- 
European ' family of languages,' the members of 
which are related to each other as descendants of 
a common ancestor, has since been abundantly 
proved by the researches of Franz Bopp, "the 



SOURCES OF HISTORY .3 

founder of the science of Comparative Philology," 
whose first work was published in 1816, and by 
those of his numerous successors in the same field. 

The science of Comparative Philology, which 
thus received its first impulse from the study of 
Sanskrit, represents by no means the least among 
the intellectual triumphs of the nineteenth century. 
The historical treatment of individual languages 
and dialects, and a comparison of the sound- 
changes which have taken place in each, have 
shown that human speech, like everything else in 
nature, obeys the laws of nature. The evidence 
obtained by this method proves that the process 
of change, by which varieties of language are 
produced from a parent stock, is not arbitrary, but 
that it takes place in accordance with certain 
ascertainable laws, the regularity of whose action 
is only disturbed by the fact that man is a reason- 
ing and imitative being. The laws, which govern 
change in language, are, in fact, partly mechanical 
and partly psychological in character. 

More valuable perhaps, from the point of view 
of the student of early civilization, is the service 
which Comparative Philology has rendered in 
throwing some light on the history of the Indo- 
European peoples before the age of written records. 
These peoples are found, in ancient times, widely 
scattered over the face of Asia and Europe from 



4 ANCIENT INDIA 

Chinese Turkestan in the East to Ireland in the 
West; but, as we have seen, there must have 
been a period more or less remote when they were 
united. Now, since words preserve the record 
both of material objects and of ideas, it has been 
possible, from a careful examination and comparison 
of the vocabularies of the diiFerent languages, to 
gain some knowledge of the state of civilization, 
the social and political institutions, and the rehgious 
ideas of the Indo-European peoples, both at the 
period when they were still united and after the 
separation of the various branches. 

In the earlier stages of the science, this line of 
investigation was, no doubt, sometimes pursued 
with too much zeal and too little discretion ; and 
the evidence of language as a record of civilization 
was sometimes strained to prove more than was 
justifiable. But there can be no question that 
certain broad facts have thus been established 
beyond the possibility of dispute. The evidence 
of language proves conclusively, for instance, that 
a particularly intimate connexion must have existed 
between the Persian and Indian branches of the 
Indo-European family. The similarity in language 
and thought between their most ancient scriptures, 
the Persian Avesta and the Indian Rig-veda, can 
only be explained on the supposition that these 
two peoples, after leaving the rest of the family, 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 5 

had lived in association for some considerable 
period, and that the separation between them had 
taken place at no very distant period before the 
date of the earlier of the two records, the Rig- 
veda. In the following pages we shall be chiefly 
concerned with this particular group of the Indo- 
European family, which is usually designated by 
the term ^ Aryan,' the name which both peoples 
apply to themselves (Avestan A iry a = Sd.usknt 
Aryd). 

Such, then, were the first fruits of the study 
by Europeans of the classical language of Ancient 
India — a complete revolution in our conception of 
the nature of human speech, and the recovery 
from the past of some of the lost history of the 
peoples, who, in historical times, have played a 
predominant part in the civilization of both India 
and Europe. The ^ discovery ' of Sanskrit, with 
its patent resemblance to Greek and Latin, sug- 
gested the possibility of a connexion which was 
undreamt of before, and prepared the way for 
the application to languages of the historical and 
comparative method of investigation, which was 
destined to win its most signal triumph when it 
was applied subsequently by Charles Darwin and 
other great scientists to the material universe and 
to living organisms. 

Familiar as the notions of an Indo-European 



6 ANCIENT INDIA 

family of languages and of the scientific study of 
language may be to us at the present day, they 
proved a hard stumbling-block to all but the most 
advanced thinkers of the late eighteenth and the 
early nineteenth centuries ; for they rudely dis- 
turbed the belief of many centuries past that 
Hebrew was the primitive language of mankind, 
and that the diversity of tongues on earth was 
the result of the divine punishment inflicted on 
the builders of the Tower of Babel. 

But great and far-reaching as has been the 
influence of the 'discovery' of the Sanskrit 
language on the intellectual life of the West, 
no less remarkable are the results which have 
followed from the application of Western methods 
of scholarship to the interpretation and elucidation 
of the ancient literatures and monuments of India. 

When, in 1784, the Asiatic Society of Bengal 
was founded by Sir William Jones for the promo- 
tion of Oriental learning, the history of India 
before the Muhammadan conquest in the eleventh 
century a.d. was a complete blank; that is to say, 
there was no event, no personahty, no monument, 
no literary production, belonging to an earlier 
period, the date of which could be determined 
even approximately. A vast and varied ancient 
Sanskrit literature, both prose and verse, existed 
in the form of manuscripts; and European 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 7 

scholars, with the aid of the ' pandits ' or learned 
men of India, were already beginning to publish 
texts and translations from the manuscripts. But 
as to the date of this literature nothing whatever 
was known. Sanskrit had ceased for many cen- 
turies past to be a language generally understood 
by the people. It had long since become, like 
Latin in the middle ages of European history, the 
exclusive possession of a class of learned men, 
who attributed to the sacred books a divine origin 
and regarded the secular literature as the work 
of sages in a dim and distant period of legend and 
mystery. The chronological conceptions of the 
pandits were those of the Puranas, which teach 
that the universe undergoes an endless series of 
creations and dissolutions corresponding to the 
days and nights of the god Brahma, each of which 
equals 1000 'great periods ' of 4,320,000 years. 
What we know as the historical period of the 
world was for them the ' Kali Age,' or the shortest 
and most degenerate of the four ages which 
together constitute a 'great period.' It was but 
as a drop in the ocean of time and might be 
neglected. 

It is due almost entirely to the labours of 
scholars during the last century and a quarter 
that the outlines of the lost history of Ancient 
India have, in a great measure, been recovered. 



8 ANCIENT INDIA 

and that its literature, which reflects the course 
of religious and intellectual civilization in India 
from about 1200 B.C. onwards, has been classified 
chronologically. 

The materials for the reconstruction of the 
history are suppHed principally from three 
sources: — (i) the literatures of the Brahmans, 
Jains, and Buddhists ; (2) inscriptions on stone 
or copper-plate, coins, and seals ; and (3) the 
accounts of foreign writers, chiefly Greek, Latin, 
and Chinese. 

At present, large gaps remain in the historical 
record and it is probable that some of them can 
never be filled, although very much may be 
expected from the progress of arch^ological 
investigation. Of the more primitive inhabitants 
of India we can know nothing beyond such general 
facts as may be gleaned from the study of pre- 
historic archseology or ethnology. History in the 
ordinary sense of the word, that is to say, a 
connected account of the course of events or of 
the progress of ideas, is dependent on the exist- 
ence of a literature or of written documents of 
some description ; and these are not to be found 
in India before the period when Aryan tribes 
invaded the country at its north-western frontier 
and brought with them an Indo - European 
civilization, resembling in its main features the 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 9 

ancient civilizations of Greece, Italy, and Germany. 
Our knowledge of Ancient India follows the 
course of this civilization as it spread, first from 
the Punjab into the great central plain of India, 
the country of the Ganges and the Jumna 
rivers, and thence subsequently into the Deccan. 
This extension is everywhere marked by the 
spread of Sanskrit and its dialects. It received a 
check in Southern India, where the older Dravidian 
civilization and languages remain predominant even 
to the present day. In this region history can 
scarcely be said to begin before the Christian era. 
Thus, the language of all the earliest records of 
India, whether literary or inscriptional, is Indo- 
European in character. That is to say, it is 
related to Greek and Latin and to our own 
English tongue, and not to the earlier forms of 
speech which it supplanted in India. The Aryan 
tribes who continued, perhaps for generations or 
even for centuries, to swarm over the mountain 
passes into Southern Afghanistan and the Punjab, 
or through the plains of Baluchistan into Sind and 
the valley of the Indus, must, no doubt, have 
spoken a variety of kindred dialects. The history 
of languages everywhere shows that this is in- 
variably the case among primitive peoples. It 
shows, too, that, in the course of time, when a 
community becomes settled and civihzation 



lo ANCIENT INDIA 

advances, the dialect of some particular district, 
which has won special importance as a centre of 
religion, politics, or commerce, gradually acquires 
an ascendancy over the others and is eventually 
accepted by general consent as the standard 
language of educated people and of literature ; 
and that, when its position is thus established, its 
use tends to supersede that of the other dialects. 
An illustration of this general rule may be taken 
from the history of our own language : it was 
*'the East Midland" variety of the Mercian 
dialect of English "that finally prevailed over the 
rest, and was at last accepted as a standard, thus 
rising from the position of a dialect to be the 
language of the Empire " (Skeat, English Dialects^ 
p. 66^ in the series of Cambridge Manuals). 

In India, such a standard or literary language 
appears first in the Hymns of the Rig-veda, the 
most ancient of which must probably date from a 
period at least 1200 years before the Christian 
era. This ' Vedic ' Sanskrit is the language of 
priestly poets who lived in the region now known 
as Southern Afghanistan, the North- Western 
Frontier Province, and the Punjab ; and it differs 
from the later 'Classical' Sanskrit rather more, 
perhaps, than the language of Chaucer differs from 
that of Shakespeare. 

After the Vedic period, Aryan civilization 



SOURCES OF HISTORY ii 

extended itself in a south-easterly direction over 
the fertile plains of the Jumna and Ganges, which 
became subsequently not only the chief political 
and religious centre of Brahmanism but also the 
birthplace of its rival religions, Jainism and 
Buddhism. It was in this region that the priestly 
treatises, known as 'Brahmanas,' and the great 
epic poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, 
were composed. 

The language of each of these classes of litera- 
ture — the Brahmanas representing almost ex- 
clusively the priestly caste, the Brahmans, and 
the epic poems belonging chiefly to the warrior 
caste, the Kshatriyas — is, in a different sense, 
transitional between Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. 
In character, the two styles may broadly be dis- 
tinguished as learned and popular respectively. 
The Sanskrit of the Brahmanas merges in the 
course of time by almost insensible degrees into 
Classical Sanskrit; the epic language, on the other 
hand, is already stereotyped and retains its archa- 
isms and its ' irregularities ' for all time. 

Thus, about the year 500 b.c, when the first 
work in strictly Classical Sanskrit appeared — 
Yaska's Nirukta or ' Explanation ' of Vedic diffi- 
culties — there were in existence three well-defined 
types of Sanskrit. The first, already invested 
with a sacred character from its great antiquity, 



12 ANCIENT INDIA 

was the poetical language of the early Aryan 
settlers in the north-west. The second was the 
language of bards, who sang at royal courts of 
wars and the deeds of the heroes and sages of old 
time. The third, to which, strictly speaking, the 
term 'Sanskrit ' (samskriia = 'cultivated,' 'literary') 
should be confined, is that form of the language 
of the Brahmans, which, as the result of a long 
course of literary treatment and grammatical re- 
finement, had gained general acceptance as the 
standard of correct speech. 

A literary language thus definitely fixed ceases 
to undergo any material change, so long as the 
civiHzation which it represents continues. Its 
spoken form must naturally, as a rule, be less 
careful and elaborate than its written form ; and 
both must vary according to the degree of 
cultivation possessed by each individual speaker 
or writer. There may thus be infinite varieties of 
style, but there is no substantial modification 
of the character of the language. Classical 
Sanskrit has remained essentially unaltered during 
the long period of nearly twenty-five centuries in 
which it has been employed, first as the language 
of the educated classes and of literature, and 
later, down to the present day, as the common 
means of communication between learned men 
in India. 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 13 

In sharp contrast to the literary language of a 
country stand the local dialects. While the 
former is fixed, the latter still continue to have a 
life and growth of their own and to change in 
accordance with the laws of human speech. 
While the literary language, although no doubt 
originally the dialect of some particular district, 
gains currency throughout the whole country 
among the educated classes, the local dialects 
continue to be spoken by the common people, 
who, in Ancient as in Modern India, must have 
formed an overwhelmingly large proportion of the 
population. It is, therefore, chiefly by a perfectly 
natural process of development that most of the 
modern vernaculars of Northern India have been 
produced from the ancient local dialects or 
'Prakrits,' as they are called (/>r(^^r//^ = * natural,' 
'uncultivated '), in precisely the same way as the 
Romance languages have sprung, not from literary 
Latin, but from the dialects of Latin spoken by 
the common people. 

While, however, the literary language and its 
dialects continue to exist side by side, the former 
invariably tends to grow at the expense of the 
latter, so long as the civilization to which they 
belong does not decline or change its character. 
The inscriptions and coin-legends of Ancient India 
afford a striking illustration of this fact. As 



14 ANCIENT INDIA 

being, from their very character, intended to 
appeal to all men, learned and unlearned alike, 
they are, on their first appearance in the third 
century B.C., written in some Prakrit ; but, as 
time goes on, their language is gradually influenced 
and eventually assimilated by the literary language, 
until, after about the year 400 a.d., Prakrit 
ceases to be used for these purposes and Sanskrit 
takes its place. 

The history of Sanskrit is especially associated 
with Brahmanism, and the tradition has remained 
through the ages unbroken by time or place. 
Sanskrit is to Brahmanism what Latin is to the 
Roman Catholic church. Jainism and Buddhism 
were revolts against Brahman tradition ; and, like 
the reformed churches in Europe, both originally 
used the type of speech, whether Sanskrit or 
Prakrit, which happened to be current in the 
various districts to which their doctrines extended. 
Thus the Buddhist scriptures appear in a Sanskrit 
version in Nepal and in Prakrit versions elsewhere. 
Through their employment for religious purposes 
some of the Prakrits developed into literary 
languages, for which, in the course of tim.e, hard 
and fast laws were laid down by grammarians, 
precisely as in the case of Sanskrit. The most 
notable of these is Pali, the literary form of some 
Indian Prakrit which was transplanted to Ceylon, 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 15 

probably in the third century b.c, and became 
there the sacred language of the particular phase 
of Buddhism which found a permanent home in 
the island, and which has spread thence to Burma 
and Siam. In India itself, after about the fifth 
century a.d., there was a growing tendency on 
the part of both Jains and Buddhists to use 
Sanskrit, which thus eventually became the 
lingua franca of religion and learning throughout 
the whole continent. 

Such then are the languages in which all the 
early literature of India and Ceylon is preserved. 
This literature is enormous in extent and most 
varied in character. No species of composition, 
whether in prose or verse, is unrepresented ; and 
few phases of human intellectual activity remain 
without their record, except in the domain of 
those sciences, which have been, even in Europe, 
the creation of the last two hundred and fifty 
years. But, if we compare any ancient Indian 
literature, Brahman, Jain, or Buddhist, with the 
Greek and Latin classics, we shall find one strik- 
ing deficiency; in none of them has the art of 
historical composition been developed beyond its 
earliest stages. Its sources — heroic poems, legend- 
ary chronicles, ancient genealogies — are indeed 
to be found in abundance. From the literatures 
and from the monuments we learn the names, and 



1 6 ANCIENT INDIA 

some of the achievements, of a great number of 
nations, who rose to power, flourished, and declined 
in the continent of India during the twenty-two 
centuries before the Muhammadan conquest ; but 
not one of these nations has found its historian. 
Ancient India has no Herodotus or Thucydides, 
no Livy or Tacitus. Its Hteratures supply 
materials by means of which it is possible to trace 
the daily life of the people, their social systems, 
their religions, their progress in the arts and 
sciences, with a completeness which is unparalleled 
in antiquity ; but events are rarely mentioned, and 
there is an almost total absence of chronology. 
Dynastic Hsts with, in some instances, the length 
of the different reigns, are certainly to be found ; 
but these in themselves supply no fixed point for 
the determination of Indian chronology. As they 
stand, they are discrepant, partly perhaps because 
of original errors, but chiefly on account of the 
textual corruptions which are the inevitable result 
of a long transmission in manuscript form ; and 
they are misleading, since they often represent 
as successive, dynasties which can be proved from 
other sources to have been contemporary. It 
has been shown that any system of Indian 
chronology, which could have been constructed 
on the data supphed by these documents 
alone, must have been hopelessly wrong by 



j SOURCES OF HISTORY 17 

hundreds, and in some cases even by thousands, 
of years. 

Fortunately, this defect in the literature is 
supplied to some extent from the other sources of 
early Indian History. For certain countries in 
India, and for certain periods in the history of 
these countries, it has been possible to construct a 
sort of chronological framework by the aid of 
dated inscriptions and coin-legends. This most 
valuable kind of historical evidence has been made 
available entirely by modern scholarship during 
the last three generations. 

When the monuments of India first attracted 
the attention of archseologists, not a single syllable 
of the ancient inscriptions or coin-legends could 
be read. All knowledge of the ancient alphabets 
had, long centuries ago, passed into oblivion. 
These alphabets, which can now be read with 
ease and certainty, are two in number, both of 
them of non-Indian (Semitic) origin. They are 
called by scholars at the present time Brahmi and 
Kharoshthi, the names which they seem to bear 
in an account of the youthful Buddha's education 
given in a Sanskrit work called the Lalita-vistara. 

Brahmi, which is usually, though not invariably 
(y. p. 151), written from left to right, has been 
shown to be the parent of all the modern alphabets 
of India, numerous and widely differing as these 

B 



1 8 ANCIENT INDIA 

are now. It is probably derived from the type of 
Phoenician writing represented by the inscription 
on the Moabite stone {c. 890 B.C.) and it is 
supposed to have been brought into India through 
Mesopotamia by merchants. Ultimately, there- 
fore, Brahmi and all the modern Indian alphabets 
appear to have much the same origin as our own, 
since all the alphabets of Europe also are to be 
traced back to the Phoenician through the Greek. 

Kharoshthi, which is particularly the alphabet 
of North-Western India (Afghanistan and the 
Punjab) is a variety of the Aramaic script which 
prevailed generally throughout Western Asia in 
the fifth century B.C. Originally, no doubt, it 
came from the same source as Brahmi. Like 
most other Semitic alphabets, probably including 
Brahmi in its earliest form, it is written from 
right to left. It disappeared from India in the 
third century a.d. ; but it remained in use for 
some time longer in the western region of Chinese 
Turkestan, which had formed a part of the Indian 
Empire of Kanishka in the first century a.d. 

The clue to the decipherment of both these 
alphabets was obtained from bilingual coins struck 
by the Greek princes who ruled over portions of 
Afghanistan and the Punjab from c. 200 B.C. to 
c, 25 B.C. These coins regularly bear on the 
obverse a Greek inscription giving the name and 



PL\TE II. 




COINS OF ANCIENT INDIA. 



\_See page 151. 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 19 

titles of the king, and on the reverse a translation 
of this inscription in an Indian dialect and in Indian 
characters. As a first step in the process of de- 
cipherment, the names of the kings in their Indian 
guise were identified with the Greek. In this way 
a clue to the alphabet was obtained ; and this clue 
soon led to the explanation of the Indian titles on 
the coins with their Greek equivalents ; but it 
was only after many years of patient effort that 
the knowledge thus gained from the coin-legends 
was applied with complete success to the decipher- 
ment and translation of the long inscriptions, which 
are found in many parts of India, engraved on stone 
or copper plates. 

These inscriptions, like the seals, are some- 
times royal and sometimes private in character. 
The coin-legends are, naturally, royal. Both 
inscriptions and coins are often dated either in 
the year of some king's reign or in the year of 
some Indian era ; and, if not actually dated, they 
are usually capable of being assigned, on archaeo- 
logical evidence, to some definite period and 
locality. They afford, therefore, positive informa- 
tion as to the history of royal houses in different 
parts of India. By their aid we may sometimes 
restore dynastic lists and determine the reigns 
of monarchs whose very names have otherwise 
vanished from the page of history. 



20 ANCIENT INDIA 

But it was neither from Indian literature nor 
from inscriptions that there came the first ray of 
light to pierce the darkness in ^yhich the history 
of Ancient India lay enveloped. That light came 
from Greece. 

For one short period only, and for one corner of 
India only, do we possess any connected narrative 
of events in the centuries before Christ. This is 
furnished by the Greek historians of the Indian 
campaigns of Alexander the Great in the years 
^ly-^ B.C., and of his successor, Seleucus Nicator, 
in 305 B.C. These historians give some account 
of the rise to power of an Indian adventurer whom 
they call Sandrokottos. It was Sir William Jones 
who first recognised that Sandrokottos was to be 
identified with Chandragupta, who is known from 
Indian sources to have been the founder of the 
Maurya Empire, which at its height, in the 
reign of his grandson, Agoka, included, not only 
all the continent of India with the exception of 
the extreme South, but also the greater part of 
the countries now known as Afghanistan and 
Baluchistan. Within a few years of the de- 
parture of Alexander, the Greek dominions in 
North-Western India came under the sway of 
Chandragupta, and they were confirmed in his 
possession by the treaty of peace which he 
concluded with Seleucus in 305 B.C. It was 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 21 

certain, then, that the accession of Chandragupta 
to power in the Punjab must have taken place at 
some date between ^2$ and 305 b.c. 

This identification of Sandrokottos with 
Chandragupta, which thus brought the Greek 
and Indian records into relation with each other, 
was long known as the ' sheet-anchor ' of Indian 
chronology. It secured a fixed point from which 
it was possible to measure chronological distances 
with some approximation to certainty. 

A number of other fixed points have since been 
gained, sometimes from one and sometimes from 
another of the three chief sources of Indian history 
— Indian literature, Indian inscriptions, and foreign 
authorities. Thus the period of the reign of Agoka, 
the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty, is deter- 
mined by the mention in one of his inscriptions of 
five contemporary Hellenic sovereigns, whose dates 
are known from Greek history : — (i) Antiochus II. 
of Syria (b.c. 261-246); (2) Ptolemy Philadelphus 
of Egypt (B.C. 285-247); (3) Magas of Cyrene 
(B.C. 285-258); (4) Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon 
(B.C. 277-239); and (5) Alexander of Epirus (ace. 
B.C. 272). 

The determination of the initial years of the 
various eras, in which the dates of inscriptions 
are commonly expressed, has further made it 
possible to arrange in systematic order the his- 



22 ANCIENT INDIA 

torical data which they supply. The Vikrama 
era of 58 B.C. and the ^aka era of 78 a.d. still 
continue to be used in different parts of India. 
The starting points of others have been deter- 
mined by investigation, e.g.^ the Traikutaka, 
Chedi, or Kalachuri era of 249 a.d. the Gupta era 
of 319 A.D., and the era of King Harshavardhana 
of 606 A.D. Each of these marks the establish- 
ment of a great power in some region of India, and 
originally denoted the regnal years of its founder. 

A most important epoch in the religious history 
of India is marked by the rise of Jainism and 
Buddhism, the dates of which have been ascer- 
tained approximately from the combined evidence 
of literary and inscriptional sources. These two 
religions, which have much in common, represent 
the most successful of a number of movements 
directed against the formality of Brahmanism and 
the supremacy of the priestly caste in the sixth 
century b.c. The leaders of both were Kshatriyas 
or members of the princely and military caste. 
Vardhamana Jnataputra, the founder of Jainism, 
probably lived from 599 to 527 B.C., and Siddhartha 
Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, from about ^62, 
to 483 B.C. 

These two reformed religions, although springing 
directly from Brahmanism and inheriting many of 
its fundamental ideas, yet introduce new elements 



SOURCES OF HISTORY 23 

into the intellectual life of India and are important 
factors in its subsequent civilization. For the 
period before their rise no positive dates are forth- 
coming. This earlier period is represented by a 
very large literature, which exhibits transforma- 
tions of so far-reaching a character in the domain 
of language, of religion, and of social institutions, 
that centuries would seem to be required for their 
accomplishment. It is possible, by tracing the 
course of such changes, to distinguish different 
strata, as it were, in the literature, and so to 
establish a sort of relative chronology for this 
early period ; but it is evident that all such dates 
as we may for the sake of convenience associate 
with this system of relative chronology must be 
conjectural. The ultimate limits within which this 
early period of Indian history must be confined 
are, on the one hand, suggested by the evidence 
of Comparative Philology and the spread of Indo- 
European civilization, and, on the other, fixed by 
the rise of Jainism and Buddhism. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA 

The names of India — Its natural limits — Its chief invaders — 
Dravidians — Aryans — Natural divisions of the continent — 
The geographical course of Aryan civilization. 

The word India originally meant the country of 
the river Indus. It is, in fact, etymologically 
identical with ' Sind.' In this restricted sense it 
occurs in the Avesta and in the inscriptions of 
King Darius (522-486 b.c.) as denoting those 
territories to the west of the Indus which, in the 
earlier periods of history, were more frequently 
Persian than Indian. It was this province which 
Alexander the Great claimed as conqueror of the 
Persian Empire. The name India became familiar 
to the West chiefly through Herodotus and the 
historians of Alexander's campaigns ; and, in 
accordance with what would almost seem to be a 
law of geographical nomenclature, the name of 
the best known district was subsequently applied 
to the whole country. 

In Sanskrit literature it is only at a comparatively 

21 



THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA 25 

late period that we find any one word to denote 
the whole continent of India. This is intelligible, 
as all the early literature belongs to the Aryan 
civilization, the gradual extension of which from 
the north-west into the central region and eventu- 
ally to the south may be traced historically ; and 
the geographical outlook of this civilization 
would naturally be limited to the stage which it 
had reached at any particular time. A compre- 
hensive term — Bhdrata or Bhdrata-varsha — seems 
to occur first in the epics. It means ' the realm 
of Bharata,' and refers to a legendary monarch who 
is supposed to have exercised universal sovereignty. 
The historical foundation for the name is found 
in the ancient Aryan tribe of the Bharatas, who 
are well known in the Rig-veda. 

The limits of this continent of India or Bharata- 
varsha, which is equal in extent to the whole of 
Europe without Russia, are for the most part well 
defined by nature. On the north, it is almost 
completely cut off from the rest of Asia by im- 
passable mountain ranges ; and it is surrounded by 
the sea on the eastern and western sides of the 
triangular peninsula which forms its southern 
portion. But the northern barrier is not absolutely 
secure. At its eastern and western extremities, 
river-valleys or mountain-passes provide means of 
communication with the Chinese Empire on the 



7.6 ANCIENT INDIA 

one hand and with Persia on the other. At the 
present time, these means of access to the Indian 
Empire have been practically closed in the interests 
of political security; but until the year 1738, 
when the Persian king Nadir Shah invaded India 
and sacked Delhi, the very capital of its Mughal 
emperors, countless hordes of Asiatic tribes have 
swarmed down the valleys or over the passes which 
lead into India. Hence the extraordinary diversity 
of races and languages which, now united under 
one sway for the first time in history, together 
constitute the Indian Empire. A glance at the 
ethnographical and linguistic maps of India will 
show that the races and languages on the east 
are Mongolian, and those on the west Persian or 
Scythian in character ; while the Aryan civilization 
which predominates in the north is the result of 
invasions which can be traced historically, and the 
Dravidian civilization which still holds its own in 
the south is probably also due to invasions in pre- 
historic times. 

The chief motive of the migration of peoples, 
which forms one of the most important factors in 
the history of the human race, was scarcity of 
food ; and the chief cause of this scarcity has in 
Central Asia been the gradual desiccation of the 
land. However this desiccation may have arisen, 
whether through physical causes which affect the 



THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA 27 

whole of our planet, or through the thrusting up, 
by shrinkage of the earth's crust, of lofty 
mountain-ranges which cut oif the rain-bearing 
winds from certain regions, or again by man's 
improvidence in the destruction of forests and the 
neglect of natural means of irrigation, it is a 
phenomenon the progress of which may be traced 
to some extent historically. Explorations in 
Baluchistan and Seistan have brought to light the 
monuments of past civilizations which perished 
because of the drying up of the land ; and above 
all the researches of Sir Aurel Stein in Chinese 
Turkestan have supplied us with materials and 
observations from which it will be possible 
eventually to write the history of desiccation in 
this part of the world with some chronological 
precision. Archaeological evidence proves that 
this region which is now a rainless desert, in 
which no living being can exist because of the 
burning heat and blinding sand-storms in summer 
and the arctic cold in winter, was once the seat of 
a flourishing civilization ; and the study of the 
written documents and works of art, discovered 
at the various ancient sites which have been 
explored, shows that these sites were abandoned 
one by one at dates varying from about the first 
century B.C. to the ninth century a.d. The import 
ance of these observations, as bearing on the 



28 ANCIENT INDIA 

history of India, lies in the consideration that its 
present isolation on the land-side was by no means 
so complete in former times, when the river-valleys 
and mountain-passes on the east and west of the 
Himalayas were open, and when the great high- 
roads leading from China to India on the east, and 
from India through Baluchistan or Afghanistan to 
Persia and so to Europe on the west, not only 
afforded a constant means of communication, but 
also permitted the migration of vast multitudes. 

The invaders from the east, greatly as they 
have modified the ethnology and the languages 
of India, have left no enduring record whether in 
the advancement of civilization or in literature. 
Invaders from the west, on the other hand, have 
determined the character of the whole continent. 
In our sketch of the civilization of Ancient India, 
we shall have to deal especially with two of these 
invasions — the Dravidian and the Aryan. 

It has sometimes been supposed that the 
Dravidians were the aborigines of India ; but it 
seems more probable that these are rather to be 
sought among the numerous primitive tribes, 
which still inhabit mountainous districts and other 
regions difficult of access. Such, for example, are 
the Gonds, found in many different parts of India, 
who remain even to the present day in the stone 
age of culture, using flint implements, hunting 



THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA 29 

with bows and arrows, and holding the most 
rudimentary forms of rehgious belief. The view 
that the Dravidians were invaders, who came into 
India from the north-west in prehistoric times, 
receives support from the fact that the Brahui 
language, spoken in certain districts of Baluchistan, 
belongs to the same family as the Dravidian 
languages of Southern India ; and it is possible 
that it may testify to an ancient settlement of the 
Dravidians before they invaded India. In any 
case, Dravidian civilization was predominant in 
India before the coming of the Aryans. Many of 
the Dravidian peoples now speak Aryan or other 
languages not originally their own ; but they still 
retain their own languages and their characteristic 
social customs in the South, and in certain hilly 
tracts of Central India ; and there can be no 
doubt that they have very greatly influenced 
Aryan civilization and Aryan religion in the 
North. Their literatures do not begin until some 
centuries after the Christian era, but the existence 
of the great Dravidian kingdoms in the South may 
be traced in Sanskrit literature and in inscriptions 
from a much earlier period. 

The term Aryan was formerly, chiefly through 
the influence of the writings of Max Miiller, used 
in a broad sense so as to include the whole family 
of Indo-European languages. It is now almost 



30 ANCIENT INDIA 

universally restricted to the Persian and Indian 
groups of this family, as being the distinctive title 
used in their ancient scriptures. 

These two groups have in common so many 
characteristic features, in regard to which they 
differ from the other members of the family, that 
we can r ily conclude that there must have been a 
period in which the ancestors of the Persians of 
the Avesta and of the Indians of the Rig-veda 
lived together as one people and spoke a common 
language. When a separation took place, the 
Persian Aryans occupied Bactria, the region of 
Balkh, i,e.^ Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush, 
and Persia, while the Indian Aryans crossed over 
the passes of the Hindu Kush into the valley of 
the Kabul River in southern Afghanistan, and 
thence into the country of the Indus, i.e. the North- 
western Frontier Province and the northern 
Punjab. The date of this separation cannot be 
determined with much accuracy. The most 
ancient literatures of the two peoples — the Indian 
Rig-veda, possibly as early as 1200 B.C., and the 
Persian Avesta, dating from the time of Zoroaster, 
probably about 660-583 B.C. — afford no con- 
clusive evidence from which it is possible to 
estimate the distance of time which separates them 
from the period of unity ; but an examination of 
the two languages seems to indicate that the 



THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA 31 

common speech from which they are derived did 
not differ materially from that of the Rig-veda, 
since Avestan forms are, from the etymological 
point of view, manifestly later than Vedic forms, 
and may generally be deduced from them by the 
application of certain well ascertained laws of 
phonetic change. It may be inferred, then, that 
the Aryan migration into India took place during a 
period which is separated by no long interval from 
the date of the earliest Indian literature. 

The progress of Aryan civilization in India is 
determined naturally by the geographical con- 
formation of the continent, which is divided into 
three well-defined principal regions : — 

(i) North- Western India, the country of the 
Indus and its tributaries. This region, bounded 
by mountainous districts on the north and west, is 
separated from the country of the Ganges and 
Jumna on the east by the deserts of Rajputana. 
With it has often been associated in history the 
country of Gujarat (including Cutch and Kathia- 
war) to the south. 

(2) Hindustan, the country of the Ganges and 
the Jumna and their tributaries, the great plain 
which constitutes the main portion of Northern 
India. 

(3) The Deccan or ' Southern ' (Skt. daks hind) 
India, the large triangular table-land lying south 



32 ANCIENT INDIA 

of the Vindhya Mountains, together with the 
narrow strips of plain-land which form its fringe 
on the eastern and western sides. 

The first of these regions is in character transi- 
tional between India and Central Asia. Into it 
have poured untold waves of invasion — Persian, 
Greek, Scythic, Hun, etc. — and many of these 
have spent their force within its limits. Hence its 
extraordinary diversity in race, language, and 
religion. The second has been the seat of great 
kingdoms, some of which, both in the Hindu and 
in the Muhammadan periods, have grown by 
conquest into mighty empires including the whole 
of Northern India and considerable portions, but 
never the whole, of the South. It has always 
included most of the chief centres of religious 
and intellectual life in India. The third region 
has a character of its own. The history of its 
kingdoms and their struggle for supremacy among 
themselves have usually been enacted within its 
own borders. It has, as a rule, successfully re- 
sisted the political, and has only by slow degrees 
admitted the intellectual, influence of the North; 
but when it has accepted ideas or institutions 
it has held them with great tenacity, so that the 
South is now in many respects the most orthodox 
and the most conservative portion of the continent. 

The literary and inscriptional records of Ancient 



THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA ;^^ 

India enable us to trace with a remarkable degree 
of continuity the course of Aryan civilization 
through the periods during which it passed from 
the first of these regions into the second and then 
eventually into the third. But it must always be 
remembered that these records are partial, in the 
sense that they represent only one type of 
civilization and only those countries to which this 
civilization had extended at any particular epoch. 
Unless this fact be borne constantly in mind, the 
records are apt to produce the impression of a 
unity and a homogeneity in the political, religious, 
and social life which never existed. The best 
corrective for this false impression is to study 
Ancient India always in the light of our know- 
ledge of Modern India and in the light of general 
history. India is and, in historical times, always 
has been composed of a number of large countries 
and a multitude of smaller communities, each 
having its own complicated racial history and each 
pursuing its own particular lines of development 
independently of its neighbours. In India, as in 
Europe, one or other of the constituent countries 
has from time to time succeeded in creating a great 
empire at the expense of its neighbours. But the 
mightiest of these empires, that of the Maurya 
kings of Magadha in the third century b.c, and 
that of the Mughal kings of Delhi at its height in 



34 ANCIENT INDIA 

the last years of the seventeenth century a.d., 
have never been co-extensive with the continent ; 
they have never included the extreme south of 
India. They were won by conquest and main- 
tained by power; and, when the power failed, 
the various countries which constituted these 
empires reasserted tlieir independence. Such a 
phenomenon as the British dominion in India, 
which is founded less on conquest than on mutual 
advantage — which holds together some 773,000 
square miles of British territory (excluding 
Baluchistan and Burma) and nearly the same 
amount (745,000 square miles) of independent 
territory administered by about 650 native princes 
and chiefs, principally because the great common 
interest of all alike is peace and security — finds 
no parallel in history. Neither has religion at 
any time formed a complete bond of union 
between these multitudinous and diverse nation- 
alities. The Brahmanical systems of thought and 
practice founded on the Vedas have never gained 
universal acceptance, as some of their text-books 
might lead us to suppose. Not only was their 
supremacy contested even in the region which 
was their stronghold — the country of the Ganges 
and the Jumna — by reformed religions such as 
Jainism and Buddhism; but their appeal was 
everywhere almost exclusively to the higher castes 



THE CIVILIZATIONS OF INDIA ^s 

who can never have formed the majority of the popu- 
lation. Most of the people, no doubt, in Ancient 
as in Modern India, were either confessedly, or at 
heart and in practice, followers of more primitive 
forms of faith. As Mr W. Crooke says, in de- 
scribing present religious conditions (J?nperial 
Gazetteer of India^ i. p. 432), "The fundamental 
religion of the majority of the people — Hindu, 
Buddhist, or even Musalman — is mainly animistic. 
The peasant may nominally worship the greater 
gods ; but when trouble comes in the shape of 
disease, drought, or famine, it is from the older 
gods that he seeks relief" 



CHAPTER III 

THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 

The Rig-veda — Oral transmission — Geography — State of 
Civilization — Religion — Germs of the later caste-system — 
The Sama-veda — The Yajur-veda — Contrasted with the 
Rig-veda — The Atharva-veda — The principal divisions of 
Northern India in Vedic times. 

The Sanskrit word veda comes from the root 
vid 'to know,' which occurs in the Latin vid-eo 
and in the Anglo-Saxon wit-an^ from which our 
English forms w/Y, wisdojii^ etc. are derived. It is 
especially used to denote the four collections of 
sacred ' wisdom,' which form the ultimate basis on 
which rest not only all the chief systems of Indian 
religion and philosophy, but also practically the 
whole of the Aryan intellectual civilization in 
India, whether sacred or secular. The most 
ancient of these collections is the Rig-veda, or 
^the Veda of the Hymns.' It consists of 1028 
hymns intended to accompany the sacrifices offered 
to the various deities of the ancient Indian 
pantheon. In respect of style and historical char- 
acter it may be compared most fittingly to the 

96 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS ^^l 

'- Psalms of David ' in the Hebrew scriptures. If 
compared by the number of verses, it is rather 
more than four times as long. 

Internal evidence, supplied by changes in lan- 
guage and progress in thought, shows that the 
composition of the hymns of the Rig-veda must 
have extended over a considerable period. They 
were handed down from generation to generation 
in the families of the 'rishis,' or sacred bards, 
who composed them ; and, at a later date, when 
their venerable antiquity had invested them with 
the character of inspired scriptures, they were 
collected together and arranged on a two-fold plan, 
firstly, according to their traditional authorship, 
and secondly, according to the divinities to whom 
the hymns in each group were addressed. Like 
all the other works of the Vedic period the Rig- 
veda has been transmitted orally from one genera- 
tion to another from a remote antiquity even 
down to the present day. If all the manuscripts 
and all the printed copies were destroyed, its text 
could even now be recovered from the mouths of 
living men, with absolute fidelity as to the form 
and accent of every single word. Such a tradition 
has only been possible through the wonderfully 
perfect organization of a system of schools of 
Vedic study, in which untold generations of 
students have spent their lives from boyhood to 



38 ANCIENT INDIA 

old age in learning the sacred texts and in teaching 
them to their pupils. This is, beyond all question, 
the most marvellous instance of unbroken con- 
tinuity to be found in the history of mankind; 
and the marvel increases when we consider that 
this extraordinary feat of the human memory has 
been concerned rather with the minutely accurate 
preservation of the forms of words than with the 
transmission of their meaning. The Brahmans, 
who, for long centuries past, have repeated Vedic 
texts in their daily prayers and in their religious 
services, have attached little or no importance to 
their sense ; but so faithfully has the verbal 
tradition been maintained by the Vedic schools 
that ' various readings ' can scarcely be said to 
exist in the text of the Rig-veda which has come 
down to us. It has probably suffered no material 
change since about the year 700 B.C., the approxi- 
mate date of xhe pada-pdtha or 'word-text,' an 
ingenious contrivance, by which each word in the 
sentence is registered separately and independently 
of its context, so as to supply a means of checking 
the readings of the samhitd-pdtha or ' continuous 
text,' and thus preventing textual corruption. But 
the sense of many Vedic words was either hope- 
lessly lost or extremely doubtful nearly two 
thousand five hundred years ago, when Yaska 
wrote his Nirukta, In fact, at that period the 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 39 

Vedic language was already regarded as divine ; 
and its obscurities in no way tended to detract 
from its sacred character — for, as the commentator, 
Sayana (died 1387 a.d.), quoting a popular maxim 
of the time, says : " It is no fault of the post if 
the blind man cannot see it " — but rather to 
strengthen the belief in its super-human origin. 
Orthodox Hindus, then as now, believed that the 
Vedas were the revealed word of God, and so 
beyond the scope of human criticism. It remained, 
therefore, for Western scholars in the nineteenth 
century, who were able to approach the subject 
without prepossessions, not only to bring to light 
again the original meaning of many passages 
of the Rig-veda, but also to show the historical 
significance of the whole collection as one of 
the most interesting and valuable records of 
antiquity. 

The region in which the hymns of the Rig- 
veda were composed is clearly determined by their 
geographical references. About twenty-five rivers 
are mentioned ; and nearly all of these belong to 
the system of the Indus. They include not only 
its five great branches on the east, from which the 
Punjab, 'the land of the five rivers,' derives its 
name, but also tributaries on the north-west. 
We know, therefore, that the Aryans of the Rig- 
veda inhabited a territory which included portions 



40 ANCIENT INDIA 

of S.E. Afghanistan, the N.-W. Frontier Province, 
and the Punjab. 

Like many later invaders of India, they, no 
doubt, came into this region over the passes of 
the Hindu Kush range of mountains. Sanskrit 
hterature subsequent to the date of the Rig-veda 
enables us to trace the progress of their Aryan 
civilization in a south-easterly direction until the 
time when it was firmly established in the plains 
of the Jumna and the Ganges. These two great 
rivers were known even in the times of the Rig- 
veda ; but at that period they merely formed the 
extreme limit of the geographical outlook. 

The type of civilization depicted in the Rig- 
veda is by no means primitive. It is that of a 
somewhat advanced military aristocracy ruling in 
the midst of a subject people of far inferior cul- 
ture. There is a wide gulf fixed between the 
fair-skinned Aryans and the dark Dasyus — the 
name itself is contemptuous, meaning usually 
' demons ' — whom they are conquering and en- 
slaving. This distinction of colour marks the 
first step in the development of the caste-system, 
which afterwards attained to a degree of rigidity 
and complexity unparalleled elsewhere in the his- 
tory of the world. 

The conquerors themselves are called compre- 
hensively ' the five peoples ' ; and these peoples 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 41 

are divided into a number of tribes, some of whom 
are to be traced in later Indian history. The 
Aryan tribes were not always united against the 
people of the land, but sometimes made war 
among themselves. Each tribe was governed by a 
king ; and the kingly ofEce was usually hereditary, 
but sometimes, perhaps, elective. As among 
other Indo-European peoples, the constitution of 
the tribe was modelled on that of the family ; 
and the king, as head, ruled with the aid and 
advice of a council of elders who represented its 
various branches. Thus, the state of society was 
patriarchal : but it was no longer nomadic. The 
people lived in villages, and their chief occupations 
were pastoral and agricultural. 

In war, the chief weapons were bows and arrows, 
though swords, spears, and battle-axes were also 
used. The army consisted of foot-soldiers and 
charioteers. The former were probably mar- 
shalled village by village and tribe by tribe as in 
ancient Greece and Germany, and as in Afghanistan 
at the present day. The war-chariots, which may 
have been used only by the nobles, carried two 
men, a driver and a fighting man who stood on his 
left. 

In the arts of peace considerable progress had 
been made. The skill of the weaver, the carpenter, 
and the smith furnish many a simile in the hymns. 



42 ANCIENT INDIA 

The metals chiefly worked were gold and copper. 
It is doubtful if silver and iron were known in the 
age of the Rig-veda, 

Among the favourite amusements were hunt- 
ing, chariot-races, and games of dice — the last 
mentioned a sad snare both in Vedic times and in 
subsequent periods of Indian history. 

The religion of the Aryan invaders of India, 
like that of other ancient peoples of the same 
Indo-European family — Greeks, Romans, Germans, 
and Slavs — was a form of nature worship, in 
which the powers of the heavens, the firmament, 
and the earth were deified. Thus Indra, the god 
of the storm, is a giant who with his thunderbolt 
shatters the stronghold of the demon and re- 
covers the stolen cows, even as the lightning-flash 
pierces the cloud and brings back the rains to 
earth; while Agni (the Latin ignis) ^ the god of 
fire, is manifested in heaven as the sun, in the 
firmament as the lighting, and on earth as the 
sacrificial fire produced mysteriously from the 
friction of the fire-sticks. The sacrifice is the link 
which connects man with^the gods, who take delight 
in the oblations, and, in return, shower blessings 
— wealth in cows and horses, and strength in the 
form of stalwart sons — on the pious worshipper. 
There are also other aspects of this religion. The 
spirits of the departed dwell in ' the world of the 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 43 

Fathers,' where they are dependent for their sus- 
tenance on the offerings of their descendants ; 
and ever lurking around man are the demons of 
famine and disease, whose insidious attacks can 
only be averted through the favour of the bene- 
ficent deities. 

A certain amount of this Vedic mythology is 
common to other Indo-European peoples, as is 
proved by such equations as the following: — 

Skt. Dyaus pitdr-^ 'the Sky-father '=Gk. Zeus 
pater=h'3ii. Ji/-/)//^r=Anglo-Saxon Tiw (cf. Tiwes 
d(Eg=Ex\^. Tuesday^. 

Skt. Ushdsa-^ 'the Dawn '=Gk. Eos for 
^ Ausds=h?i\.. Aurora for * ^z/j^^^ = Anglo-Saxon 
eas-t (Eng. east^. 

Points of similarity with the ancient Persian 
religion are more numerous ; and, in estimating 
their cogency as evidence that the Persian and 
Indian Aryans dwelt together for some period 
after their separation from the other branches of 
the Indo-European stock, we must bear in mind 
the fact that the Persian religion, as represented 
in the Avesta, is the outcome of the reforms of 
Zoroaster (660-583, b.c.) which, presumably, did 
away with much of its ancient mythology. It 
must suffice here to mention one striking feature 
which the two religions share in common. The 
Vedic offerings of so?na^ the intoxicating juice of 



44 ANCIENT INDIA 

a plant, find their exact counterpart in the 
Avestan haoma^ a word which is etymologically 
identical. 

The hymns of the Rig-veda were the work of 
priestly bards who took no small pride in their 
poetic skill ; and, although we may find much 
monotony in the collection, due to the great 
number of hymns which are sometimes devoted 
to the same topic, and numerous diiEculties and 
obscurities, caused chiefly by our own defective 
knowledge of the language and of the period, 
yet the beauty and strength of many of the 
hymns are such as fully to justify this pride. 
The principles of scansion are determined by the 
number of syllables in each line, by a ccesura after 
the fourth or fifth syllable, and by quantity, as 
in Greek and Latin, except that the rigid scheme 
of short and long is generally confined to the 
endings of the lines. The commonest metres are 
of eight, eleven, or twelve syllables to the line, 
and three or four of these lines usually make a 
verse. But there are a number of other varieties, 
some of them more complicated in structure. 

The office of priest, therefore, required not only 
a knowledge of the ritual of the sacrifice, but also 
some skill in the making of hymns. No doubt, 
originally the king of the tribe was supreme in 
sacred as in secular matters \ and it is possible 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 45 

that certain indications of this earlier state of 
affairs may still survive in the Rig-veda. But 
already, by a natural division of labour, the per- 
formance of the ordinary sacrifices on the king's 
behalf was in practice entrusted to a priest 
specially appointed, who was called purohita 
(=Latin, '• prc^fectus '). This office, too, had 
probably become hereditary, and it tended to 
grow in importance with the strengthening of 
the religious tradition. 

Thus, although in the early period of the Rig- 
veda, the caste-system was unknown — the four 
castes are only definitely mentioned in one of the 
latest hymns — yet the social conditions which led 
to its development were already present. As we 
have seen, the first great division between con- 
querors and conquered was founded on colour. 
In fact, the same Sanskrit word, varna^ means 
both ^colour' and 'caste.' This was the basis 
on which a broad distinction was subsequently 
drawn between the 'twice-born,' i.e. those who 
were regularly admitted into the religious com- 
munity by the investiture of the sacred cord, and 
the servile caste or ^udras. The three-fold 
divisions of the ' twice-born ' into the ruling 
class (Kshatriyas), the priests (Brahmanas), and 
the tillers of the soil (Vaigyas) finds its parallel in 
other Indo-European communities, and indeed it 



46 ANCIENT INDIA 

seems to represent the natural distribution of 
functions which occurs generally in human societies 
at a similar stage of advancement. 

Of the more primitive inhabitants of the land 
the Rig-veda teaches us little, except that they 
were a pastoral people possessing large herds of 
cattle and having as defences numerous strong- 
holds. Contemptuous references describe them 
as a dark-complexioned, flat-faced, ' noseless ' race, 
who spoke a language which was unintelligible, 
and followed religious practices which were ab- 
horrent to their conquerors. Of all the rest of 
India beyond the country of the Rig-veda we know 
nothing whatever at this period. 

Of the three other Vedas two are directly de- 
pendent on the Rig-veda. They are especially in- 
tended for the use of the two orders of priests who 
took part in the sacrifices in addition to the Hotar 
w^ho recited the verses selected from the Rig-veda. 
The Sama-veda, which chiefly consists of verses 
from the Rig-veda ' pointed ' for the benefit of 
the Udgatar or singing priest, has Httle or no 
historical value. The Yajur-veda, which contains 
the sacrificial formula5 to be spoken in an under- 
tone by the Adhvaryu, while he performed the 
manual portions of the ceremony, s on the other 
hand a most important document for the history 
of the period to which it belongs. It introduces 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 47 

us not only to a new region, but also to a complete 
transformation of religious and social conditions. 

The Yajur-veda marks a further advance in the 
trend of Aryan civilization from the country of 
the North-West into the great central plain of 
India. Its geography is that of Kuru-kshetra, 
'the field of the Kurus,' or the eastern portion of 
the plain which lies between the Sutlej and the 
Jumna, and Pafichala, the country to the south- 
east between the Jumna and the Ganges. This 
region, bounded on the west by the sacred region 
which lay between the rivers Sarasvati (Sarsuti) 
and Drishadvati (Chautang), was the land in which 
the complicated system of Brahmanical sacrifices 
was evolved, and 'it was in later times regarded 
with especial reverence as ' the country of the holy 
sages,' while the first home of the Aryan invaders 
of India seems to have been almost forgotten. 
Kuru-kshetra is also the scene of the great battle 
which forms the main subject of the national 
epic, the Mahabharata. One of its capitals was 
Indraprastha, the later Delhi, which became the 
capital of the whole of India under the Mughal 
emperors, and which has recently, in 1912, been 
restored to its former proud position. 

Religious and social conditions, as reflected in 
the Yajur-veda, differ very widely from those 
of the period of the Rig-veda. All the moral 



48 ANCIENT INDIA 

elements in religion seem to have disappeared, 
extinguished by an elaborate and compHcated 
system of ceremonial which is regarded no longer 
as a means of worship but as an end in itself Sin 
in the Rig-veda means the transgression of the 
divine laws which govern the universe : in the 
Yajur-veda it means the omission — whether in- 
tentional or accidental — of some detail in the 
endless succession of religious observances which 
filled man's life from birth to death. The sacrifice 
had developed into a system of magic by means of 
which supernatural powers might be attained ; and 
the powers thus gained might be used for any 
purpose, good or bad, spiritual or temporal, and 
even to coerce the gods themselves. In the 
Yajur-veda also, the earlier stages of the caste- 
system, in essentially the form which it bears to 
the present day, are distinctly seen. Not only are 
the four great social divisions hardening into castes, 
but a number of mixed castes also are mentioned. 
Thus were fixed the outlines of the system which 
subsequently, by further differentiation according 
to trades, etc., became extraordinarily compHcated. 
The tremendous spiritual power, which the sacrifice 
placed in the hands of the priestly caste, was no 
doubt the cause which directly led to the pre- 
dominance of this caste in the social system. 

The religion and the social system of the Yajur- 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 49 

veda represent, to a great extent, the development 
of tendencies which are clearly to be recognized 
in the Rig-veda; but they also, no doubt, show 
the influence of the religious beliefs and the social 
institutions of the earlier non-Aryan inhabitants of 
India ; and it seems possible sometimes to trace this 
influence. To cite one instance only. Snake- 
worship is common among primitive peoples in 
India. No trace of it is to be found in the Rig- 
veda, but it appears in the Yajur-veda. The 
presumption, therefore, is that it was borrowed 
from the earlier non-Aryan peoples. 

The Atharva-veda diifers from the other three 
in not being connected primarily with the sacrifices. 
It is generally more popular in character than the 
Rig-veda. It represents the old-world beliefs of 
the common people about evil spirits and the 
efficacy of spells and incantations rather than the 
more advanced views of the priests. Although 
the collection is manifestly later in date than the 
Rig-veda, yet, for the history of early civilization, 
it is even more valuable, since much of its subject- 
matter belongs to a more primitive phase of religion. 
It is especially important for the history of science 
in India, as its charms to avert or cure diseases 
through the magical efficacy of plants contain the - 
germs of the later systems of medicine. 

The geographical information supplied by the 



so ANCIENT INDIA 

Atharva-veda is not sufficient to enable us to 
determine the precise locality in which it was 
compiled ; but the tribes mentioned in it indicate 
that the full extent of the two first regions 
occupied by the Aryan civilization during the 
earUer and later Vedic periods — the country of 
the Indus and the country of the Ganges and the 
Jumna — was known at the time when the collec- 
tion was made. 

For a long period, Aryan civilization was con- 
fined within these limits. The definitions of the 
whole region, and of its chief divisions, are thus 
given in The Laws of Manu, a work, in its present 
form, of a much later date, but undoubtedly 
representing the traditions from Vedic times : — 

Arydvarta, ' the country of the Aryans,' is the 
district lying between the Himalaya and the 
Vindhya Mountains, and extending from the 
eastern to the western sea. 

Madbya-defa, 'the Middle Country,' is that 
portion of Arydvarta^ which lies between the same 
two mountain ranges, and is bounded by Vinagana 
(the place where the river Sarasvati loses itself in 
the sand) on the west, and by Fraydga (the modern 
Allahabad, where the Ganges and the Jutnna meet) 
on the east. 

Brahmarshi-dega^ ' the county of the holy sages,' 
includes the territories of the Kurus, Matsyas, 



THE PERIOD OF THE VEDAS 51 

Panchalas and ^urasenas {i.e. the eastern half of 
the State of Patiala and of the Delhi division of 
the Punjab, the Alwar State and adjacent territory 
in Rajputana, the region which lies between the 
Ganges and the Jumna, and the Muttra District 
in the United Provinces). 

Brahmdvarta.^ ' the Holy Land,' lies between the 
sacred rivers Sarasvati (Sarsuti) and Drishadvati 
(Chautang), and may be identified generally with 
the modern Sirhind. Its precise situation is some- 
what uncertain, owing to the diiEculty of tracing 
the courses of rivers in this region ; for many of 
them lose themselves in the sand and sometimes 
reappear at a distance of several miles. That 
Brahmavarta formed part of Kuru - kshetra is 
seen from the following verse from the Maha- 
bharata : — 

^^ Dakshhiena Sarasvatya Drishadvatyuttarena cha 
Te vasant't Kurukshetre, te vasanti Trivlshtape.^^ 

" Those, who dwell in Kuru-kshetra to the south of the 
Sarasvati and the north of the Drisadvatl, dwell in Heaven." 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PERIOD OF THE BRAHMANAS AND 
UPANISHADS 

Growth of a prose literature — Contents of the Brahmanas — 
Language — Geography — The Qatapatha Brahmana — Its 
relation to Buddhism and to the ancient Sanskrit epics — 
The religion of works and the religion of knowledge — The 
Upanishads — Pantheism — The intellectual movement not 
confined to the priestly caste. 

The most ancient works of Indian literature, with 
which we have been dealing hitherto, are almost 
entirely in verse. This fact is in accordance with 
the general rule that poetry precedes prose in the 
development of literature. The only prose to be 
found in the Vedas occurs in some versions of the 
Yajur-veda, where a sort of commentary is 
associated with the verse portions. From this 
point of departure, we may trace the growth of 
a large prose literature of a similar character. 
Each of the Vedas was handed down traditionally 
in a number of priestly schools devoted entirely to 
its study, and each of these schools produced in 
the course of time its own particular text-book, 

62 



BRAHMANAS AND UPANISHADS S3 

in the form of an elaborate prose treatise, intended 
to explain to the priest the mystical significance of 
that portion of the sacrificial ceremony which he 
was called upon to perform. These treatises are 
styled Brahmanas or 'religious manuals.' Their 
contents are of the most miscellaneous character ; 
but they may be classified broadly under three 
categories : — (i) directions (yidbi)^ (2) explana- 
tions (arthavddd)^ and (3) theosophical specula- 
tions (upanishacT). The last were, as we shall see, 
developed more fully in a special class of works 
bearing the same title. The Brahmanas pre- 
suppose an intimate acquaintance with the very 
complicated ritual of the sacrifice ; and they would 
have been unintelligible to us, if we had not 
fortunately also possessed the later 'Sutras,' in 
which each separate branch of Vedic lore is 
minutely explained. 

The Brahmanas are priestly documents in the 
narrowest and most exclusive sense of the term. 
At first sight, their contents would seem to be the 
most hopeless possible form of historical material. 
It is only incidentally and accidentally that they 
afford any insight whatever into the political and 
social conditions of the country and the period to 
which they belong. They give an utterly one- 
sided view even of the religion. But religion had 
other and nobler aspects even in this priest-ridden 



54 ANCIENT INDIA 

age, and the memorial of these is preserved in the 
Upanishads. 

Nevertheless, there are found embedded in the 
Brahmanas a number of old-world legends which 
supply valuable evidence for the history of 
primitive human culture. For instance, a remini- 
scence of the far distant period, in which human 
sacrifices prevailed, is to be seen in a story told 
in the Aitareya Brahmana (VII. iii.) of the Rig- 
veda, about a Brahman lad named ^unaligepa, who 
was about to be sacrificed to the god Varuna, 
when the god himself appeared and released him. 
Another story in the same Brahmana (II. i.) illus- 
trates the stages of transition from human sacrifice, 
in which at first some animal, and subsequently a 
cake made of rice, was in ordinary practice sub- 
stituted for the human victim. 

Occasionally also some valuable information as 
to the social and political state of India may be 
gleaned from the Brahmanas. The coronation 
ceremonies referred to in the eighth book of the 
Aitareya Brahmana show how completely the 
priestly caste had, in theory at least, gained 
supremacy over the kingly caste. The same book, 
moreover, shows an extension of the geographical 
horizon, for it mentions by name a number of the 
peoples of Southern India. It also records the 
kingly titles used in different regions of India; 



BRAHMANAS AND UPANISHADS S5 

and these titles seem to show that, at this early- 
period, the most diverse forms of government 
ranging from absolute monarchies to self-governing 
(svaraj) communities were to be found. This 
interpretation would certainly be in accordance 
with what we know from the inscriptions and 
other historical sources of a later date. The 
interesting fact, that the Brahmanical religion did 
not include all the tribes of Aryan descent, is 
gathered from the account given in the Tandya 
Brahmana of certain sacrifices (the vrdtya-stomas)^ 
which were performed on the admission of such 
Aryans into the Brahman community. The 
description of these non-Brahmanical Aryans — 
'' they pursue neither agriculture nor commerce ; 
their laws are in a constant state of confusion ; 
they speak the same language as those who have 
received Brahmanical consecration, but nevertheless 
call what is easily spoken hard to pronounce " 
(trans, in Weber, Ind. Lit.^ p. Gy^ — shows that 
they were freebooters speaking the Prakrits or 
dialects allied to Sanskrit. 

For the student of language the Brahmanas 
possess the highest interest. They are perfect 
mines of philological specimens. They show a 
great variety of forms which are transitional 
between the language of the Rig-veda and the 
later Classical Sanskrit ; and as being, together 



56 ANCIENT INDIA 

with the prose portions of the Yajur-veda, the 
oldest examples of Indo-European prose, they 
afford materials for the study of the development 
from its very first beginnings of a prose style and 
of a more complicated syntax than is feasible in 
ordinary verse. Thus we find, existing side by side 
in India at the same period, an ancient poetry, no 
longer primitive in character but elaborated by 
many generations of bards, and a rudimentary 
prose, which often reminds us of the first attempts 
of a child or an uneducated person to express his 
thoughts in writing. 

The geography of the Brahmanas is generally 
the land of the Kurus and Panchalas, ' the country 
of the holy sages ' ; but at times it hes more to 
the west or more to the east of this region. The 
^atapatha Brahmana is especially remarkable for 
its wide geographical outlook. Some of its books 
belong to the first home of the Aryan invaders in 
the north-west. In others the scene changes from 
the court of Janamejaya, king of the Kurus, to 
the court of Janaka, king of Videha (Tirhut or 
N. Bihar). The legend of Mathava, king of Videgha 
(the older form of Videha), in the first book, 
indicates the progress of Brahmanical culture 
from the ' Holy Land ' of the Sarasvati, first 
into Kosala (Oudh), and then over the river 
Sadanira (probably the Great Gandak, a tributary 



BRAHMANAS AND UPANISHADS si 

of the Ganges) which formed its boundary, into 
Videha. 

The ^atapatha Brahmana suppHes an important 
link in the history of religion and literature in 
India; for it is closely connected with Buddhism 
on the one hand, and with the ancient Sanskrit 
epics on the other. Many of the terms which 
subsequently became characteristic of Buddhism, 
such as arhat ' saint ' and gramana ' ascetic,' first 
occur in the ^atapatha ; and ~ among the famous 
teachers mentioned in it are the Gautamas, the 
Brahman family whose patronymic was adopted by 
the Kshatriya family in which Buddha was born. 
It was to Janamejaya, king of the Kurus, that 
the story of one of the great epic poems — the 
Mahabharata — is said to have been related ; while 
Janaka, king of Videha, is probably to be identified 
with Janaka, the father of Sita, the heroine of the 
other great epic, the Ramayana. 

Such are some of the comparatively few features 
of general interest which relieve the dreary 
monotony of the endless ritualistic and liturgical 
disquisitions of the Brahmanas. As we have seen, 
the kind of religion depicted in the Brahmanas is 
absolutely mechanical and unintelligent. The 
hymns from the Rig-veda are no longer used with 
any regard to their sense, but verses are taken 
away from their context and strung together 



SS ANCIENT INDIA 

fantastically, because they all contain some 
magical word, or because the scheme of their 
metres, when arranged according to the increasing 
or decreasing number of syllables, resembles a 
thunderbolt wherewith the sacrificer may slay his 
foes, or for some other equally valid reason. 
Such a system may have been useful enough to 
secure the supremacy of the Brahmans and to 
keep the common people in their proper place ; 
but it is not to be imagined that it can ever have 
satisfied the intellectual aspirations of the Brahmans 
themselves ; and, as a matter of fact, there has 
always been in India a broad distinction between 
a 'rehgion of works,' intended for the common 
people and for the earlier stages in the religious 
Hfe, and a ' religion of knowledge ' which appealed 
only to an intellectual aristocracy. Certain hymns 
of reflection in the Rig-veda and the Atharva-veda 
show that the eternal problems of the existence 
and the nature of a higher power, and of its 
relation to the universe and to man, were already 
filling the thoughts of sages even at this early 
period ; and, as we have seen, theosophical 
speculation finds its place even in the Brahmanas. 
It is, however, specially developed in certain 
treatises, called Upanishads, which usually come 
at the end of the Brahmanas, separated from them 
by Aranyakas or 'forest-books,' which are transi- 



BRAHMANAS AND UPANISHADS 59 

tional in character as in position. Thus the whole 
of Vedic Hterature, which is comprehensively 
styled fruti or 'revelation' as distinguished from 
the later smriti or ' tradition,' falls into two great 
classes. The Vedas and Brahmanas belong to the 
'religion of works,' and the Aranyakas and 
Upanishads to the ' religion of knowledge.' 

A similar principle of division applies also to 
the four dgramas^ or religious stages, into which 
the life of the Brahman is theoretically divided. In 
the first, he lives as a pupil in the family of his 
guru and learns from him the sacred texts and the 
sacrificial procedure ; in the second, he marries and 
brings up a family, religiously observing all the 
domestic rites ; in the third, after he has seen the 
face of his grandson, he goes forth into the forest, 
either accompanied by his wife or alone, to live 
the life of an anchorite ; and in the fourth, he 
abandons all earthly ties and devotes himiself to 
meditation on the dtman or 'Supreme Soul.' In 
this way, his life is divided between the ' religion 
of works ' in the two first, and the ' religion of 
knowledge ' in the two last stages. 

The Upanishads, with which the philosophical 
hymns of the Rig-veda and the Atharva-veda are 
closely connected in spirit, lead us into the realm 
of what we should call philosophy rather than 
religion. But the two have never been separated 



6o ANCIENT INDIA 

in India, where the latter has always been regarded 
as the necessary preparation for the former. 
Orthodoxy consists in the unquestioning accept- 
ance of the social system and the religious 
observances of Brahmanism. Beyond this, 
speculation is free to range without restriction, 
whether it lead to pantheism, to dualism, or even 
to atheism. 

The Upanishads are not systematic. They 
contain no orderly expositions of metaphysical 
doctrine. They give no reasons for the views 
which they put forth. They are the work of 
thinkers who were poets rather than philosophers. 
But nevertheless they contain all the main ideas 
which formed the germs of the later systems of 
philosophy, and are, therefore, of the utmost 
importance for the history of Indian thought. 

The object of the ' religion of knowledge ' is 
neither earthly happiness nor the rewards of ' 
heaven. Such may be the fruits of the ' religion 
of works.' But, according to Indian ideas, the joys 
of earth and of heaven are alike transient. They 
may be pursued by the man of the world who 
mistakes appearances for reaUties ; but the sage 
turns away from them, for he knows that, as the 
result of works, the human soul is fast bound in a 
chain of mundane existences, and that it will go 
on from birth to birth, whether in this world or 



BRAHMAN AS AND UPANISHADS 6i 

in other worlds, its condition in each state of 
existence being determined by the good or evil 
deeds performed in previous existences. His sole 
aim, therefore, is to obtain mukti^ or 'release,' 
from this perpetual succession of birth and re- 
birth. This release can only be obtained by 
'right knowledge,' that is to say, by the full 
realization of the fact that there is no existence, 
in the highest and only true sense of the term, 
except the dtman or the ' World-Soul.' In reality 
everything is the atman and the atman is every- 
thing. There is no second 'being.' All that 
seems to us to exist besides the atman is 
'appearance' or 'illusion.' It is some disguise 
of the atman, due merely to a change in name 
and form. Just as all the vessels which are made 
of clay, by whatever names they may be called 
and however many different forms they may 
assume, are in reality only clay, so everything, 
which appears to us to have an independent exist- 
ence, is really only a modification of the atman. 
There is, therefore, no essential difference between 
the soul of the individual and the 'World Soul' 
The complete apprehension of this fact constitutes 
the ' right knowledge,' which brings with it 
' release ' from the circle of mundane existences, 
which are now clearly seen to be apparent only 
and not real. 



62 ANCIENT INDIA 

This pantheistic doctrine, which forms the main, 
but by no means the exclusive, subject of the 
Upanishads, was, at a later period, developed 
with marvellous fulness and subtilty in the 
Vedanta system of philosophy. Its influence has 
been more potent than any other in moulding the 
spiritual and intellectual life of India even down to 
the present day. 

The evidence of language shows that the 
earliest Upanishads, which are also the most 
important, belong to the period of the later 
Brahmanas. Regarded as sources for the history 
of religion and civilization in India, these two 
classes of words supplement and correct each 
other. The Brahmanas represent the ceremonial, 
and the Upanishads the intellectual, phase of 
religion ; and the social aspects of these two 
phases stand in striking contrast. While the 
performance of the sacrifice, with all its complicated 
ritual, remained entirely in the hands of the 
priestly caste, members of the royal caste and 
even learned ladies joined eagerly in the discus- 
sions, which were held at royal courts, concerning 
the nature of the atman, and acquitted themselves 
with distinction. Thus the far-famed Brahman, 
Gargya Balaki, came to Ajata9atru, the king of 
Kagi (Benares), and, having heard his words of 
wisdom, humbly begged that he might be per- 



BRAHMANAS AND UPANISHADS 67, 

mitted to become his pupil ; while the ladies 
Gargi and Maitreyi discoursed concerning these 
deep matters, on perfectly equal terms, with 
Yajnavalkya, the great rishi of the court of 
Janaka, king of Videha. The time of the 
Upanishads was, in fact, one of great spiritual 
unrest, and of revolt against the formalism and 
exclusiveness of the Brahmanical system. In this 
revolt the royal caste played no unimportant part ; 
and, as we shall see in the next chapter, the 
leaders of the two chief religious reforms, known 
as Jainism and Buddhism, were both scions of 
princely families. 



CHAPTER V 

THE RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM 

The founders of Jainism and Buddhism — Their doctrines con- 
trasted with Brahmanism — Their literatures — The Sanskrit 
epics — The Puranas — Genealogies — The Pali epics — The 
Sutras. 

With the rise of Jainism and Buddhism we enter 
the period of Indian history for which dates, at 
least approximately correct, are available. We are 
no longer dependent for our chronology on an 
estimate of the length of time required for the 
evolution of successive phases of thought or 
language. 

These two religions differ from the earlier 
Brahmanism in so far as they repudiate the 
^ religion of works ' as inculcated in the Vedas and 
the Brahmanas. That is to say, they deny the 
authority of the Vedas and of the whole system of 
sacrifice and ceremonial which was founded on the 
Vedas ; and in so doing they place themselves out- 
side the pale of Brahman orthodoxy. On the other 
hand, their fundamental ideas are substantially 
those of the ^ religion of knowledge ' as represented 

64 



RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM 65 

in the Upanishads. These ideas are, in fact, the 
postulates on which all Indian religions and all 
Indian philosophies rest. They hold, one and all, 
that the individual soul is fast bound by the power 
of its own karma or '- actions ' to a continuous series 
of birth and re-birth which need never end ; 
and the object of one and all is to find out the 
way by which the soul may be freed from the 
bonds of this unending mundane existence. They 
differ from one another, partly in regard to the 
means whereby this freedom may be obtained, 
and partly in their views as to the nature of the 
universe and of the individual soul, and as to the 
existence or non-existence of some being or some 
first cause corresponding to the Atman or ' World- 
Soul ' of the Upanishads. 

Vardhamana Jnataputra, the founder of Jainism, 
called by his followers Jina (hence the epithet 
^ Jain ') ^ the Conqueror ' or Mahdvira '- the 
Great Hero,' probably lived from about 599 to 
527 B.C. As his surname denotes, he was a scion 
of the Kshatriya or princely tribe of Jfiatas, and 
he was related to the royal family of Vai9ali 
(Basarh) in Videha (Tirhut). His system of 
teaching, as it has come down to us, is full of meta- 
physical subtilties ; but, apart from these, its main 
purpose, summed up in a few words, is to free the 
soul from its mundane fetters by means of the 

£ 



66 ANCIENT INDIA 

* three jewels' — a term also used in Buddhism, but 
in a different sense — viz. ^ right faith,' 'right 
knowledge,' and 'right action,' each of these 
headings being divided and subdivided into a 
number of dogmas or rules of life. 

The Jains still form a wealthy and important 
section of the community in many of the large towns, 
particularly in Western India, where their ancestors 
have left behind them an abiding record in the 
beautiful temples of Gujarat. They have also 
played a notable part in the civilization of Southern 
India, where the early literary development of the 
Kanarese and Tamil languages was due, in a great 
measure, to the labours of Jain monks. 

The founder of Buddhism — the Buddha or 
'Enlightened' as he was called by his disciples — was 
Siddhartha, whose date was probably from about 
^6^ to 483 B.C. He belonged to the Kshatriya 
tribe of ^akyas, and so is often styled ' ^akya- 
muni,' the sage of the Cakyas ; but, in accordance 
with a practice which prevailed among the 
Kshatriyas, he bore a Brahman surname, Gautama, 
borrowed from one of the ancient families of Vedic 
Rishis. The (^akyas ruled over a district in what 
is now known as the Western Tarai of Nepal ; 
and, at Buddha's period, they were feudatories of 
the king of Kosala (Oudh). In recent years some 
most interesting archaeological discoveries have 



RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM ^^ 

been made in this region, perhaps the most interest- 
ing of all being the inscribed pillar which was 
erected, c. 244 b.c, by the Buddhist emperor 
A^oka to mark the spot where the Buddha was 
born. 

Buddha shared the pessimism of his period, the 
literature of which constantly reminds us of the 
words of the Preacher — ' Vanity of vanities : all is 
vanity ' — and he sought a refuge from the world 
and a means of escape from existence, first in the 
doctrine of the Atman, as set forth in the 
Upanishads, and subsequently in a system of the 
severest penance and self-mortification. But neither 
of these could sati sfy him ; and after a period of 
meditation he propounded his own system, which 
in its simplest form is comprised in the four head- 
ings of his first sermon at Benares : — " sorrow : the 
cause of sorrow : the removal of sorrow : the way 
leading to the removal of sorrow." That is to say, 
all existence is sorrow ; this sorrow is caused by 
the craving of the individual for existence, which 
leads from birth to re-birth ; this sorrow can be 
removed by the removal of its cause ; this removal 
may be effected by following the eight-fold path, 
viz. 'right understanding,' 'right resolve,' 'right 
speech,' 'right action,' 'right living,' 'right effort,' 
'right mindfulness,' 'right meditation.' It will be 
seen, then, that the ' eight-fold path ' of Buddhism 



6S ANCIENT INDIA 

is essentially identical with the ^ three jewels' of 
the Jains, and that both of them differ from the 
Upanishads chiefly in substituting a practical rule 
of life for an abstract 'right knowledge,' as the 
means whereby ' freedom ' may be secured. 

Jainism and Buddhism also diiFer materially from 
Brahmanism in their organization. Brahmanism 
is strictly confined to the caste-system, in which a 
man's social and religious duties are determined 
once and for all by his birth. Jainism and 
Buddhism made a wider claim to universality. 
In theory, all distinction of castes ceased within 
the religious community. In practice, the firmly 
established social system has proved too strong for 
both religions. It is observed by the Jains at the 
present day, while, in India itself, it has re- 
absorbed the Buddhists many centuries ago. 
Brahmanism is not congregational. Its observ- 
ances consist partly of caste-duties performed by 
the individual, and partly of sacrifices and cere- 
monies performed for his special benefit by priests. 
In ancient times there w^ere, therefore, no Brahman 
temples. Jainism and Buddhism were, on the 
contrary, both congregational and monastic. One 
striking result of this difference is that the most 
ancient monuments of India teach us a great deal 
about the Jains and Buddhists and little or nothing 
about the Brahmans. The one-sided impression, 



RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM 69 

which the comparative lack of this important 
species of evidence for the earliest history of 
Brahmanism is apt to produce, must be corrected 
from a study of the literature. 

The language of Brahmanism is always and 
everywhere Sanskrit. The language of the Jain 
and Buddhist scriptures is that of the particular 
district or the particular period to which the 
different books or versions belong. 

Buddhism disappeared entirely from India 
proper at the end of the twelfth century a.d., but 
it still flourishes at the northern and southern ex- 
tremities, in Nepal and Ceylon. From its original 
home it has extended far and wide into Eastern 
Asia; and its ancient books are preserved in four 
great collections : — Pali (in Ceylon, Burma, and 
Siam), Sanskrit (in Nepal), Tibetan, and Chinese. 

Thus both Jainism and Buddhism arose and 
flourished originally in the same region of India, 
viz. the districts to the east of the 'Middle Country,' 
including the ancient kingdoms of Kosala, Videha, 
and Magadha, i.e. the modern Oiidh together 
with the old provinces of Tirhut and S. Bihar in 
Western Bengal. They spread subsequently to 
other regions, and for many centuries divided the 
allegiance of India with Brahmanism. 

Both religions produced large and varied litera- 
tures, sacred and secular, which are especiafly 



^o ANCIENT INDIA 

valuable from the historical point of view, as they 
represent traditions which are, presumably, in- 
dependent of one another and of Brahmanism. 
We may, therefore, reasonably believe in the 
accuracy of a statement if it is supported by all 
the three available literary sources, Brahman, 
Jain, and Buddhist, since it is almost certain that 
no borrowing has taken place between them. 
The chief difficulty which the historian finds in 
using these materials Hes in the fact that the 
books in their present form are not original. 
They are the versions of a later age ; and it is not 
easy to determine to what extent their purport 
has been changed by subsequent additions or 
corrections, or by textual corruption. 

This remark is especially true of some of the 
Brahman sources. For instance, the ancient epic 
poems, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and 
the Puranas or 'old-world stories' are undoubtedly, 
in their present form, many centuries later than 
the date of some of the events which they profess 
to record, and their evidence, therefore, must be 
used with caution. But it can scarcely be ques- 
tioned that much of their substance is extremely 
ancient, although the form in which it is expressed 
may have undergone considerable change in the 
course of ages. 

The Mahabharata, or 'great poem of the de- 



RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM 71 

scendants of Bharata/ consists of about 100,000 
couplets usually of thirty-two syllables each. 
That is to say, if reckoned by the number of 
syllables, it is about thirty times as long as 
Milton's 'Paradise Lost/ Only about a fifth of 
this mass has anything whatever to do with the 
main story, viz. the war between the Kurus and 
the Pandus. All the rest is made up of episodes, 
or disconnected stories, or philosophical poems. 
There can be no doubt that the Mahabharata, as 
it stands now, is the creation of centuries; and 
criticism has succeeded in distinguishing various 
stages in its growth and in assigning certain pro- 
bable limits of date to these stages. It must 
suffice here to say that the historical groundwork 
of the story would seem to be an actual war at a 
remote period between the well-known Kurus and 
the Pandus, whose history is obscure ; and that an 
epic poem, which forms the nucleus of the present 
Mahabharata, was put together at least as early 
as the fourth century B.C. from traditional war 
songs founded on events which took place at a 
much earlier date. 

While the Mahabharata belonged originally 
to the 'Middle Country,' the Ramayana belongs 
rather to the districts lying to the east of 
this region. As its title denotes, it cele- 
brates ' the story of Rama,' a prince of the 



^^ ANCIENT INDIA 

royal Ikshvaku family of Kosala (Oudh), and its 
heroine is his faithful wife Sita, daughter of 
Janaka, king of Videha (Tirhut). Unlike the 
Mahabharata, the Ramayana is, on the whole, 
probably the product not only of one age but 
also of one author, Valmiki. It is not entirely free 
from more recent additions ; but the main poem 
forms one consistent whole, and such indications 
of date as can be found seem to show that it was 
composed probably in the fourth or third century 
B.C. As we have seen, some of its characters 
appear to be far more ancient and to be men- 
tioned in the Upanishads. 

There can be no doubt that, originally at least, 
the ancient epics belonged rather to the Kshatriyas 
than to the Brahmans. Their scenes are courts 
and camps, and their chief topics the deeds of 
kings and warriors. Their religion is that of the 
kingly caste. Among their deities, Indra, who 
was especially the sovereign lord of the kings of 
the earth, stands most prominent, and the future 
reward which awaits their heroes for the faithful 
discharge of kingly duty is a life of material 
happiness in Indra's heaven. Their language is 
neither that of the Brahmanas and Upanishads, 
nor that which is known as Classical Sanskrit. It 
is less regular and more popular in character than 
either of these ; and like all poetical languages it 



RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM 73 

preserves many archaisms. We can scarcely be 
wrong in supposing that this epic Sanskrit was 
formed by the minstrels who wandered from court 
to court singing of wars and heroes. At a later 
date, when the supremacy of the Brahman caste 
was firmly established, no doubt a more definitely 
religious tone was given to the epics. The history 
of the Mahabharata, in fact, seems to show such 
a transition from a purely epic to a didactic char- 
acter. Originally the story of a war, such as 
would appeal chiefly to the military caste, it has 
become through the accretions of ages — the work, 
no doubt, of Brahman editors — a vast encyclopjedia 
of Brahmanical lore. 

Closely connected in character with the 
Mahabharata are the Puranas. The word 
pur ana means ^ancient'; and the title is justified 
by the nature of the contents of the eighteen long 
Sanskrit poems which are so called. These consist 
chiefly of legendary accounts of the origin of the 
world and stories about the deeds of gods, sages, 
and monarchs in olden times. Works of this 
description and bearing the same title are men- 
tioned in the Atharva-veda and in the Brahmanas. 
This species of literature must, therefore, be ex- 
tremely old, and there can be no doubt that much 
of the subject-matter of the early Puranas has 
been transmitted to the later versions. But, in 



74 ANCIENT INDIA 

their present form, the Puranas are undoubtedly 
late, since some of the dynasties which they 
mention are known to have ruled in the first 
six centuries of the Christian era. Together 
with these, however, they mention others which 
belong to the last six centuries B.C., and others 
again which they attribute to a far more 
remote antiquity. It is evident that the Puranas 
have been ' brought up to date ' and wilfully 
altered so frequently, that their ancient and 
modern elements are now often inextricably 
confused. 

In theory, these ' family genealogies ' {vanifd- 
nucharitd) constitute one of the five essential 
features of a Purana : they are supposed to 
form part of the prophetic description given by 
some divine or semi-divine personage, in a far 
remote past, of the ages of the world to come 
and of the kings who are to appear on earth. 
They are, therefore, invariably delivered in the 
future tense. Such lists are absent from many of 
the modern versions, but, where they do occur, 
there can be no doubt that they were originally 
historical. Occasionally they give not only the 
names of the kings, but also the number of years 
in each reign and in each dynasty. The informa- 
tion which they supply is supported, to some 
extent, by the literatures of the Jains and 



RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM 75 

Buddhists, and, to some extent, by the evidence 
of inscriptions and coins. But, in the course of 
time, these lists have become so corrupt, partly 
through textual errors, and partly through the 
' corrections ' and additions of editors, that, as 
they stand at present, they are neither in agree- 
ment with one another nor consistent in them- 
selves. Nevertheless, the source of many of 
their errors is easily discovered ; and it is quite 
possible that, when these errors have been 
removed from the text by critical editing, many 
of the apparent discrepancies and contradictions of 
the Puranas may likewise disappear. 

A somewhat similar problem is presented also 
by the Pali epic poems of Ceylon. The Dipa- 
vamsa in its present form dates from the fourth 
century a.d. and the Mahavamsa from the sixth 
century a.d. ; but both are almost certainly 
founded on traditional chronicles which were 
far more ancient. The professed object of both 
is to record the history of Buddhism from the 
earliest times, and in particular its history in the 
island of Ceylon from the date of its introduction 
by Mahendra (Mahinda) c. 24.6 B.C. to the 
reign of Mahasena, at the beginning of the 
fourth century a.d. There can be little doubt 
that, when the miraculous elements and other 
later accretions are removed from these chronicles, 



^6 ANCIENT INDIA 

there remains a substratum of what may fairly be 
regarded as history. 

The period to which the earhest Jain and 
Buddhist Hterature belongs is marked by the 
growth of a species of composition — the Sutra — 
which is peculiarly Indian. It is used by all sects 
alike and applied to every conceivable subject, 
sacred or secular. The Sutras may, perhaps, 
most aptly be said to represent the codification 
of knowledge. The word means ' thread ' ; and a 
treatise bearing the title consists of a string of 
aphorisms forming a sort of analysis of some 
particular subject. In this way all the different 
branches of learning — sacrificial ritual, philosophy, 
law, the study of language, etc. — which were 
treated somewhat indiscriminately in earlier works 
such as Brahmanas and Upanishads were system- 
atized. The Sutra form was, no doubt, the 
result of a method of instruction which was 
purely oral. The teacher, as we know from 
the extant Buddhist Sutras, was wont to enun- 
ciate each step in the argument and then to 
enforce it by means of parallel illustrations and 
by frequent reiteration until he had fully im- 
pressed it on the pupil's mind. The pupil thus 
learned his subject as a series of propositions, and 
these he remembered by the aid of short sentences 
which became in the course of time more and more 



RISE OF JAINISM AND BUDDHISM 77 

purely mnemonic. The Sutras are therefore, as a 
rule, unintelligible by themselves and can only be 
understood with the help of a commentary. They 
preserve a wonderfully complete record both of 
the social and religious life and of intellectual 
activity in almost every conceivable direction, but 
they are unhistorical in character and rarely throw 
any light, even incidentally, on the poHtical condi- 
tions of the times and countries to which they 
belong. 

All the literary sources, Brahman, Jain, and 
Buddhist, are in general agreement as to the 
chief political divisions of Northern India in the 
sixth and fifth centuries, b.c. The number of 
large kingdoms mentioned in the lists is usually 
sixteen; but in addition to these there were many 
smaller principalities, and many independent or 
semi-dependent communities, some of which were 
oligarchical in their constitution. The chief feature 
in the subsequent history is the growth of one of 
the large kingdoms, Magadha (S, Bihar), which was 
already becoming predominant among the nations 
east of the Middle Country during Buddha's life- 
time. It eventually established an empire which 
included nearly the whole of the continent of 
India. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE INDIAN DOMINIONS OF THE PERSIAN 
AND MACEDONIAN EMPIRES 

Relations between India and the West — Kings of Mitanni — 
Cyrus — Inscriptions of Darius — Herodotus — Ctesias — 
Gandhara and 'India' — Expedition of Xerxes against 
Greece — Alexander the Great — Arrian — Q. Curtius 
Rufus — Alexander's Indian campaigns — Limits of his 
conquests — His Indian satrapies — India after his death. 

We have seen that the present political isolation 
of India is a comparatively modern feature in its 
history, and that, in ancient times, many of the 
physical impediments also, which now prevent free 
communication both with the Farther East and 
with the West, did not exist. We have seen that 
the results of such communication in prehistoric 
times are attested by the certain evidence of 
ethnology and language. We now approach the 
period during which relations between India and 
the West (Western Asia and Europe) are to be 
traced in historical records. 

The region of Western Asia, which lies between 
India and the ^gean and Mediterranean Seas, 

78 







y^7 3f 


% 


\ A R A c nSi 




\ /I 

NX ' lii^ 






\ 0\S I A^ 



■tst: — - 



>-^" 



»3o»a)~~^f- 










E OF ALEXANDER 



Cities 

1. Babylon 

2. Balkh 

3. Ecbatana 

4. Gaugamela 

5. Herat 

6. Kabul 

7. Kandahai' 

8. Karachi 

9. Persepolis 
10. Peshawar 
11 Q.uetta.(Bolan Pass} 

12. Samarkand 

13. Sialkot 

14. Taxila 




MAP OF N.W. INDIA AND ADJACENT COUNTRIES IN THE T'ME OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 79 

that is to say the region which comprises the 
modern countries of Afghanistan, Baluchistan, 
Persia, and the northern provinces of Turkey in Asia 
(Armenia, Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Syria) 
is famous as the site of many of the most advanced 
civihzations of antiquity. In extent, it is larger 
than the continent of India, but less than India 
and Burma combined. Here, as in India, many 
peoples of different races and languages have 
played their part on the stage of history ; and 
here, too, now one and now another of these 
peoples has, from time to time, become predominant 
among its fellows and has succeeded in establishing 
a great empire. As in the case of India also, the 
history of these ancient civilizations has been 
recovered from the past by modern scholarship. 
Excavations of ancient sites in the valleys of the 
Tigris and Euphrates, and elsewhere in this 
region, have brought to light thousands of in- 
scriptions in cuneiform characters, not one syllable 
of which could have been read a hundred years 
ago. These inscriptions, now that many of 
them have been deciphered, tell of Assyrian and 
Babylonian civilizations which were flourishing at 
least as early as 2200 B.C., and of a still earlier 
Sumerian civilization, the monuments of which 
seem to go back to about 4000 B.C. 

Of especial interest from the point of view of 



8o ANCIENT INDIA 

Indian history are the cuneiform inscriptions which 
relate to the kings of Mitanni, a branch of the 
Hittites established in the district of Malatia in 
Asia Minor; for we learn from them that not 
only did the kings of Mitanni in the fifteenth and 
fourteenth centuries B.C. bear Aryan names, but 
also that they worshipped the deities of the Rig- 
veda — Indra, Varuna, Mitra, and the A9vins (the 
horsemen gods, the Castor and Pollux of Indian 
mythology), under their Vedic title ^Nasatya.' 
The precise manner in which the kings of Mitanni 
and the Aryans of the Rig-veda were connected 
must remain for the present uncertain ; but, as 
many ancient sites in this region are still un- 
explored and as only a portion of the inscriptions 
already discovered have yet been published, there 
seems to be no Kmit to the possibilities presented 
by this most fertile field of archeology, and it is 
not improbable that both this and many other 
obscure problems may still be solved. 

That there may have been constant means of 
communication both by land and sea between the 
Babylonian Empire and India seems extremely 
probable ; but, although there are traditions, 
there is no real evidence that the sway of any of 
the powers of Western Asia extended to the east 
as far as India, until the time of Cyrus (558-530 
B.C.), the founder of the Persian Empire, to whom, 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 8i 

on the authority of certain Greek and Latin 
authors, is attributed the conquest of Gandhara. 
This geographical term usually denotes the region 
comprising the modern districts of Peshawar in 
the N.-W. Frontier Province and Rawalpindi in 
the Punjab, but in the Old Persian inscriptions it 
seems to include also the district of Kabul in 
Afghanistan. This province formed the eastern 
limit of a vast empire which, in the reign of Cyrus, 
included not only the whole of Western Asia as 
described above, but other countries to the north 
of India and Afghanistan, and in the reign of his 
successor Cambyses (530-522 B.C.) also Egypt. 

Gandhara thus forms a most important link 
connecting India with the West ; and it holds a 
unique position among all the countries of India 
from the fact that its history may be traced with 
remarkable continuity from the times of the Rig- 
veda even down to the present day. Its inhabit- 
ants, the Gandharis, are mentioned both in the 
Rig-veda and the Atharva-veda ; and Gandhara 
appears among the countries of India in Sanskrit 
literature from the period of the Upanishads 
onwards, in the earliest Buddhist literature, and 
in the most ancient Indian inscriptions. It remained 
a Persian province for about two centuries ; and, 
after the downfall of the empire in 331 B.C., it, 
together with the Persian province of ^ India ' or 

F 



82 ANCIENT INDIA 

' the country of the Indus,' which had been added 
to the empire by Darius not long after 516 B.C., 
came under the sway of Alexander the Great. 
Through Gandhara and the Indian province was 
exercised the Persian influence, which so greatly 
modified the civilization of North-Western India. 

The sources, from which our knowledge of the 
Indian dominions of the Persian Empire is derived, 
are of two kinds: — (i) the inscriptions of King 
Darius I (522-486 b.c), and (2) Greek writers, 
notably Herodotus and Ctesias. 

The historical inscriptions of Darius are at 
three important centres in the ancient kingdom of 
Persia — Behistun, Persepolis, and Naksh-i-Rustam. 
They are engraved in cuneiform characters and in 
three languages — Old Persian, Susian, and Baby- 
lonian. The Behistun inscription, cut into the 
surface of a lofty cliff at a height of about 500 
feet above the ground, is famous in the annals of 
scholarship; for it was through the publication of 
its Old Persian version by Sir Henry Rawlinson in 
1847, ^h^^ ^^^ numerous difficulties in the de- 
cipherment of the cuneiform alphabet were finally 
overcome. The historical importance of these 
inscriptions lies in the fact that they contain lists 
of all the subject peoples, and therefore indicate 
the extent of the Persian Empire at the time when 
they were engraved. 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 83 

The chief object of the 'Histories' of Hero- 
dotus is to give an account of the struggles 
between the Greeks and the Persians during the 
period from 501 to 478 B.C. His third book 
contains a Hst of the twenty ' nomes ' or fiscal 
units, into which Darius divided the empire, 
together with the names of the peoples included 
in each and the amount of tribute imposed. 
Herodotus both confirms and amplifies the in- 
formation supplied by the inscriptions. His work 
is by far the most valuable record of the Persian 
Empire which has come down to us. 

■ Ctesias resided at the Persian court for seventeen 
years (c. 415-398 B.C.) as physician during the 
reigns of Darius II (424-404 B.C.), and Artaxer- 
xes Mnemon (404-358 B.C.). He wrote accounts 
both of Persia and India of which there are 
extant fragments preserved by later writers, as 
well as abridgements made by Photius, patriarch 
of Constantinople, in the ninth century a.d. The 
writings of Ctesias relating to India are, in the 
form in which they have survived, descriptive of 
the races and the natural productions of the 
country rather than historical. 

Such information as may be gleaned from the 
available sources as to the political history of the 
Persian provinces of Gandhara and ' India ' may 
thus be summarized. 



84 ANCIENT INDIA 

Gandhara is said to have been conquered during 
the reign of Cyrus. The writers to whom we 
owe this information certainly Hved several 
centuries after the time of Cyrus, but it is not 
improbable that they may have possessed good 
authority for their statements. In the Behistun 
inscription of Darius, the date of which is about 
516 B.C., the Gandharians appear among the 
subject peoples in the Old Persian version ; but 
their place is taken in the Susian and Babylonian 
versions by the Paruparaesanna. These were the 
inhabitants of the Paropanisus, or Hindu Kush. 
As a rule, a distinction may be observed between 
the country of the Paropanisadae (the Kabul 
Valley, in Afghanistan) and Gandhara, but the 
two names seem to be used indiscriminately in 
these inscriptions, probably as denoting generally 
the region which included both. In the inscrip- 
tions at Behistun no mention is made of the 
' Indians ' who are included with the Gandharians 
in the lists of subject peoples given by the in- 
scriptions on the palace of Darius at Persepolis 
and on his tomb at Naksh-i-Rustam. From this 
fact it may be inferred that the ' Indians ' were 
conquered at some date between 516 B.C. and the 
end of the reign of Darius in 486 B.C. The 
preliminaries to this conquest are described by 
Herodotus, who relates that Scylax was first sent 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 85 

by Darius (probably about 510 b.c.) to conduct a 
fleet of ships from one of the great tributaries of 
the Indus in the Gandhara country to the sea, and 
to report on the tribes hving on both banks of 
the river. 

Ahhough it is not possible to determine the 
precise extent of the ' Indian ' province thus added 
by Darius to the Persian Empire, yet the informa- 
tion supplied by Herodotus indicates with sufficient 
clearness that it must have included territories on 
both sides of the Indus from Gandhara to its 
mouth, and that it was separated from the rest of 
India on the east by vast deserts of sand, evi- 
dently the present Thar or Indian Desert. The 
' Indian ' province, therefore, no doubt included 
the Western Punjab generally and the whole of 
Sind. According to Herodotus it constituted the^ 
twentieth and the most populous fiscal division of 
the empire and it paid the highest annual tribute 
of all. The Gandharians are placed together with 
three other peoples in the seventh division, which 
paid altogether less than half that amount. 

During the reigns of Darius and his successor 
Xerxes took place the Persian expeditions against 
Greece, the total defeat of which by a few 
small states forms one of the most stirring episodes 
in history. The immediate cause of the war 
between Persians and Greeks was the revolt, in 



S6 ANCIENT INDIA 

501 B.C., of the Greek colonies in Ionia, the 
district along the western coast of Asia Minor, 
which had become tributary to Persia after the 
defeat of Crossus, king of Lydia, by Cyrus in 
546 B.C. The lonians were aided by the 
Athenians, who thus incurred the hostility of the 
Persians ; and, after the revolt was subdued, the 
Persian arms were turned against Greece itself. 

Since the Persians thus became acquainted with 
the Greeks chiefly through the Ionian colonists, 
they not unnaturally came to use the term Taund 
'lonians,' which occurs in the inscriptions of 
Darius, in a wider sense to denote Greeks or 
people of Greek origin generally. The corre- 
sponding Indian forms (Skt. Tavana and Prakrit 
Tona\ which were borrowed from Persia, have 
the same meaning in the Indian literature and 
inscriptions of the last three centuries before and 
the first two centuries after the Christian era. 
At a later date, these terms were used in India to 
denote foreigners generally. 

Of the most powerful of the Persian expedi- 
tions against Greece, which was accompanied by 
King Xerxes in person in 480 B.C., Herodotus has 
preserved a full account. It was made up of 
contingents sent by no fewer than forty-nine 
subject nations of the Persian Empire, and it is 
said to have numbered more than two million six 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 87 

hundred thousand fighting men. In this vast 
army both of the Persian provinces of India were 
represented, the Gandharians being described by- 
Herodotus as bearing bows of reed and short 
spears, and the ' Indians ' as being clad in cotton 
garments and bearing similar bows with arrows 
tipped with iron. 

After the time of Herodotus, the history of 
Northern India, as told by Greek writers, almost 
ceases until the period when both Greece and 
Persia had submitted to the Macedonian conqueror, 
Alexander the Great. But it is important to 
remember that this lack of information is to a great 
extent accidental and due to the fact that the 
writings of Ctesias have only survived in frag- 
ments, and that other writings have been lost. 
There is no reason to doubt that the Indian 
provinces were included in the Persian Empire 
and continued to be governed by its satraps until 
the end. There is also no reason to doubt that 
during the whole of this period the Persian 
Empire formed a link which connected India with 
Greece. We know that the battles of the 
Persian king were fought, to a very great extent, 
with the aid of Greek mercenaries, and that 
Greek officials of all kinds readily found employ- 
ment both at the imperial court and at the courts of 
the satraps. At no period in early history, probably. 



88 ANCIENT INDIA 

were the means of communication by land more 
open, or the conditions more favourable for the 
interchange of ideas between India and the West. 

But the event which, in the popular imagination, 
has, for more than twenty-two centuries past, 
connected India with Europe, is undoubtedly the 
Indian expedition of Alexander the Great. He 
came to the throne of Macedon in 336 B.C., at the 
age of twenty ; and, after subduing Greece, he 
crossed over the Hellespont and began the con- 
quest of Western Asia in 334 B.C. After the 
defeat of the Persian monarch, Darius III Codo- 
mannus, at the decisive battle of Gaugamela in 
331 B.C., the Persian dominions in India together 
with all the rest of the empire came nominally 
under the sway of the conquerors. The military 
campaigns which followed had, as their ostensible 
object, the vindication of the right of conquest 
and the consolidation of the empire thus won. 

The route by which Alexander approached India 
passed through the Persian provinces of Aria 
(Herat in North-Western Afghanistan), Drangiana 
(Seistan, in Persia, bordering on South-Western 
Afghanistan), and Arachosia (Kandahar in South- 
Eastern Afghanistan), and thence into the country of 
the Paropanisadae (the Kabul Valley, the province 
of East Afghanistan which adjoins the present 
North-Western Frontier Province). Here, in the 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 89 

spring of 329 B.C., he founded the city of Alex- 
andria-sub-Caucasum, ' Caucasus ' being the name 
which the Greeks gave to the Paropanisus (Hindu 
Kush), the great chain of mountains which in ancient 
times separated India from Bactria, and which now 
divides Southern from Northern Afghanistan. This 
city Alexander used as his base of operations ; and 
hence he made a series of campaigns with the 
object of subduing the Persian provinces which 
lay to the north — Bactria (Balkh) and Sogdiana 
(Bukhara). On his return to the city which he 
had founded, he began to make preparations for 
the invasion of India in the summer of 327 B.C. 

If we reckon from this time to the actual date 
of Alexander's departure from India in the 
autumn of 325 B.C., the total duration of the 
campaign in India, that is to say the Kabul Valley, 
the North-Western Frontier Province, the Punjab, 
and Sind, was about two years and three months. 
As has been observed, this period is unique in the 
history of Ancient India in so far as it is the only one 
of which detailed accounts have come down to us. 

The names are recorded of about twenty Greek 
writers, who are known to have composed histories 
of this campaign. Some of them actually accom- 
panied Alexander, w^hile the others were his 
contemporaries. But all their works without ex- 
ception have perished. We, however, possess 



90 ANCIENT INDIA 

five different accounts of Alexander and his 
exploits by later authors to whom these original 
records were accessible. Of these the two most 
important are Arrian and Curtius. 

Arrian, who was born about 90 a.d. and died 
in the reign of the Roman Emperor, Marcus 
Aurelius (161-180 a.d.), wrote in Greek an 
account of Alexander's Asiatic expedition, called 
the ^ Anabasis of Alexander,' which was modelled 
on the ' Anabasis ' of Xenophon, and also a book 
on India, which was founded on the work of 
Megasthenes and intended to supplement the 
account of Ctesias. Arrian is our most trust- 
worthy authority. 

Q. Curtius Rufus, whose date is somewhat 
doubtful, wrote a work on the exploits of 
Alexander which has, with some probability, been 
assigned to the reign of Claudius (41-54 a.d.). 
This historical biography has been more praised 
for its literary merits than for its accuracy. 

The difficulties, which the reader encounters 
in his endeavours to trace the progress of 
Alexander's campaign in India with the aid of 
these and other classical authorities, are very con- 
siderable. In the early stages of the campaign, 
the military operations of Alexander and his 
generals were carried out in the mountainous 
districts of Afghanistan and the North-Western 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 91 

Frontier Province which He between Kabul and 
the Indus. This region, then as now, was in- 
habited by numerous warlike tribes living in a 
perpetual state of feud with one another. Even 
to the present day much of its geography is 
scarcely known to the outer world. The fights 
with warlike tribes and the sieges of remote 
mountain strongholds, which the historians of 
Alexander describe in detail, find their parallels in 
the accounts of the military expeditions, which the 
Indian government is obliged to send from time 
to time to quell disturbances on the North- 
western Frontier. Even now it is scarcely 
possible to follow the course of such expeditions, 
as described in books or newspapers, without the 
aid of special military sketch-maps drawn to a 
large scale. The difficulty is greatly increased 
when our only guides are ancient records, in 
which the identification of place-names with their 
modern representatives is often uncertain. Thus, 
to cite perhaps the most striking instance of this 
uncertainty, no episode in Alexander's career has 
been more famous through the ages than his 
capture of the rock Aornos, a stronghold which 
was fabled to have defied all the efforts of 
Hercules himself, and no subject has attracted 
more attention on the part of students of Indian 
history than the identification of its present site ; 



92 ANCIENT INDIA 

but, in spite of all the learning and ingenuity 
which have been brought to bear on the point 
during the last seventy years, the geographical 
position of Aornos still remains to be decided. 

Early in the spring of 326 B.C., Alexander and 
his army passed over the Indus, probably by 
means of a bridge of boats at Ohind, about six- 
teen miles above Attock, into the territories of the 
king of Taxila, who had already tendered his sub- 
mission. Taxila (Sanskrit Takshagila)^ the capital 
of a province of Gandhara, was famous in the time 
of Buddha as the great university town of India, 
and is now represented by miles of ruins in the 
neighbourhood of Shahdheri in the Rawalpindi 
District. From this city Alexander sent a sum- 
mons to the neighbouring king, Porus, calling 
upon him to surrender. The name, or rather title, 
^ Porus,' probably represents the Sanskrit Paurava^ 
and means ^the prince of the Purus,' a tribe who 
appear in the Rig-veda. Porus, who ruled over a 
kingdom situated between the Hydaspes (Jhelum) 
and the Acesines (Chenab), returned a defiant 
answer to the summons, and prepared to oppose 
the invaders at the former river with all his forces. 
The ensuing battle, in which the Macedonian 
forces finally prevailed, is the most celebrated in 
the history of Alexander's Indian campaign. His 
conquests were subsequently extended, first to the 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 93 

Hydraotes (Ravi), and then to the Hyphasis 
(Beas), which marks their Hmit in an easterly 
direction. His soldiers refused to go farther, in 
spite of the eagerness of their leader. 

Beyond the Beas dwelt the people whom the 
Greek historians call 'Prasioi.' This name is, no 
doubt, intended to represent the Sanskrit Prachyah^ 
' the Easterns,' and is a collective term denoting 
the nations of the country of the Ganges and 
Jumna. The Greek and Latin writers speak of 
them as of one great nation ; but, as we have 
seen, this region included a number of large king 
doms and a multitude of smaller states. It is, 
however, quite possible that, at this period, all 
these kingdoms and states were united under the 
suzerainty of Magadha. Hitherto Alexander had 
not been brought face to face with any great 
confederation of the nations of India. He had 
conquered some states and accepted the allegiance 
of others ; but none of these could, in all pro- 
bability, be compared in point of strength with 
any of the great nations of Hindustan. It is 
useless to speculate as to what might have been 
the result if Alexander had crossed the Beas 
and come into conflict with the combined forces 
of the Prasioi. 

After the refusal of the army to proceed, 
Alexander retraced his line of march to the 



94 ANCIENT INDIA 

Hydaspes (Jhelum), on either bank of which he 
had previously founded a city — Bucephala, in 
honour of his favourite charger, Bucephalus, pro- 
bably near the modern town of Jhelum, on the 
right bank, at the point where his army had 
crossed the river, and Nicaea, ' the city of victory,' 
on the left bank, on the site of the battle with 
Porus. At these cities Alexander collected the 
fleet which was to convey a large portion of his 
forces down the rivers of the Punjab to the mouth 
of the Indus, and thence through the Arabian 
Sea to the head of the Persian Gulf. 

But Alexander's career of conquest in India was 
not finished. He had hitherto not only reclaimed 
the Persian province of Gandhara, but had annexed 
the whole of the Northern Punjab which lay be- 
yond, as far as the River Beas. He now proceeded, 
on his return journey, to reclaim the Persian pro- 
vince of 'India,' viz. the Western Punjab and 
Sind. 

The command of the fleet was entrusted to 
Nearchus, who thus performed for Alexander a 
somewhat similar task to that which, nearly two 
centuries before, had been undertaken by Scylax 
at the command of Darius. Nearchus wrote an 
account of his adventures which is no longer 
extant, but which is quoted frequently by Arrian 
in his Anabasis of Alexander. The progress of 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 95 

the fleet as, protected by armies marching on 
either bank, it passed down the Jhelum into the 
Chenab, and so into the Indus, is described by the 
Greek and Latin historians with their usual minute- 
ness. The ordinary difficulties, which the reader 
finds in tracing the course of their narrative on 
the map of India, are here increased by the fact 
that all the rivers of the Punjab are known to 
have changed their courses. Such changes have 
been very considerable during the few centuries 
for which accurate observations are available, and 
the rivers must, accordingly, in many cases, have 
flowed in very different channels at the time of 
Alexander, more than two thousand two hundred 
years ago. We are, therefore, now deprived, to 
a great extent, of the chief means by which it is 
often possible to identify the modern position of 
ancient historical sites. But, although it may not 
always be easy to follow the details of the constant 
series of mihtary operations which marked the 
journey to the sea, the final result of these opera- 
tions is certain. The conqueror of the Persian 
Empire had fully established his claim to be the 
suzerain of the peoples who were formerly included 
in its ' Indian ' province. 

Before leaving India in the autumn of 325 B.C., 
Alexander had made provision for the future con- 
trol of his new dominions by the appointment of 



96 ANCIENT INDIA 

satraps to govern the difFerent provinces. In so 
doing he was merely perpetuating the system 
which had become firmly rooted in Northern India 
as the result of two centuries of Persian rule. 
The satraps whom he selected as governors in 
the former provinces of the Persian empire were 
Greek or Persian ; while, in the case of the newly 
added territories, he seems, where possible, to have 
chosen the native prince as satrap. Alexander, 
in fact, carried into practice the traditional Indian 
policy recommended by Manu (vii. 202), and fol- 
lowed, wherever it has been possible or expedient, 
by conquering powers in India generally, both 
ancient and modern, that a kingdom which had 
submitted should be placed in the charge of 
some member of its ancient royal family. So both 
the king of Taxila, who accepted Alexander's 
summons to submit, and Porus, who valiantly re- 
sisted, were made satraps over their own dominions. 
Indeed, to the former dominions of Porus, who 
was probably a ruler of exceptional ability, were 
added those of some of his neighbours. 

Thus, in all periods of history, local govern- 
ments in India have gone on almost unchanged in 
spite of conquest after conquest. It was always 
regarded as a legitimate object of the ambition of 
every king to aim at the position of a chakravartin 
or ' supreme monarch.' If his neighbours agreed, 



PERSIANS AND MACEDONIANS 97 

so much the better; but, if they resisted his pre- 
tentions, the question was decided by a pitched 
battle. In either case, the government of the 
states involved was usually not affected. The 
same prince continued to rule, and the nature of 
his rule did not depend on his position as suzerain 
or vassal king. Generally speaking, the condition 
of the ordinary people was not affected, or was 
only affected indirectly, by the victories or defeats 
of their rulers. The army was not recruited from 
the tillers of the soil. The soldier was born, not 
made. It was just as much the duty of certain 
castes to fight, as it was the duty of others not to 
fight. War was a special department of govern- 
ment in which the common people had no share. 

These considerations enable us to understand 
why the invasion of India by Alexander the Great 
has left no traces whatever in the literature or in 
the institutions of India. It affected no changes 
either in the methods of government or in the life 
of the people. It was little more than a military 
expedition, the main object of which was to gratify 
a conqueror's ambition by the assertion of his 
suzerainty. But this suzerainty was only effective 
so long as it could be enforced. In June 323 B.C., 
a little more than a year after his return from 
India, Alexander died at Babylon, and with his 
death Macedonian rule in India ceased. His sue- 



98 ANCIENT INDIA 

cesser, Seleucus Nicator, endeavoured in vain to 
re-conquer the lost possessions, c. 305 B.C. Be- 
fore this date all the states of North- Western 
India, including whatever remnants there may- 
have been of the military colonies established by 
Alexander, had come under the sway of an Indian 
suzerain. 



CHAPTER VII 



THE MAURYA EMPIRE 



The Kingdom of Magadha — Chandragupta — Seleucus Nicator 
— Megasthenes — Bindusara — A^oka — His edicts — Extent 
of the Maurya Empire — Intercourse with the West — The 
propagation of Buddhism — Later history of the Mauryas 
— Continuity of poHcy of Indian rulers. 

The descriptions of Alexander's campaign are 
especially valuable as enabling us to realize the 
political conditions of the land of the Indus at this 
period. We may gather from Indian literature that 
the political conditions of the land of the Ganges 
were not widely different. Here, too, the country 
was divided into a number of states varying greatly 
in size and power; and here, too, at some period 
between the lifetime of Buddha and the invasion 
of Alexander the Great, a conquering power — 
but, in this case, a native power — had succeeded 
in establishing a suzerainty over its neighbours. 
The kingdom of Magadha (S. Bihar) was already 
growing in power in Buddha's time ; and 
we are probably justified in inferring from the 
statements of Alexander's historians that its as- 

99 



loo ANCIENT INDIA 

cendancy over the Prasioi, or the nations of Hindu- 
stan, was complete at the time of his invasion. 

Soon after the return of Alexander, the throne 
of Magadha, and with it the imperial posses- 
sions of the Nanda dynasty, passed by a coup 
d'etat into the hands of an adventurer whom the 
Greek and Latin writers call Sandrokottos. As 
we have seen, the identification of this personage 
with the Chandragupta, who is well known from 
Indian literature, and whose story, at a later date, 
formed the subject of a Sanskrit historical play 
called the Mudrd-rdkshasa^ supplied the first fixed 
point in the chronology of Ancient India. 

Chandragupta, whose surname Maurya is 
supposed to be derived from the name of his 
mother, Mura, is the first historical founder of a 
great empire in India. As king of Magadha he 
succeeded to a predominant position in Hindu- 
stan ; and, within a few years of Alexander's 
departure from India, he had gained possession 
also of the North- Western region. The empire 
which he established included therefore the whole 
of Northern India lying between the Himalaya 
and Vindhya Mountains, together with that 
portion of Afghanistan which lies south of the 
Hindu Kush. We have no detailed information 
as to the process by which the North-Western 
region thus passed from one suzerainty to another. 



THE MAURYA EMPIRE loi 

We can only surmise that the victorious career of 
Chandragupta must have resembled that of 
Alexander — that some states willingly gave in 
their allegiance to the new conqueror, while 
others did not submit without a contest. 

Alexander's death in 323 b.c. was followed by 
a long struggle between his generals for the 
possession of the empire. The eastern portion 
which, in theory at least, included the Indian 
dominions, fell eventually to Seleucus Nicator, 
who took possession of Babylon and founded the 
dynasty commonly known as that of the Seleucid 
Kings of Syria in 312 B.C. 

About the year 305 B.C., Seleucus invaded 
India with the object of reclaiming the conquests 
of Alexander which had now passed into the 
power of Chandragupta. No detailed account of 
this expedition is extant. We only know from 
Greek and Latin sources that Seleucus crossed the 
Indus, and that he concluded with Chandragupta 
a treaty of peace, by the terms of which the 
Indian provinces formerly held by Darius and 
Alexander were definitely acknowledged to form 
part of the empire of Chandragupta. 

The most important consequence of this treaty 
was the establishment of political relations between 
the kingdom of Syria, which was now the pre- 
dominant power in Western Asia, and the Maurya 



102 ANCIENT INDIA 

empire of Northern India. For a considerable 
period after this date there is evidence that these 
political relations were maintained. The Maurya 
empire was acknowledged in the West as one of 
the great powers ; and ambassadors both from 
Syria and from Egypt resided at the Maurya 
capital, Pataliputra (Patna). 

The first ambassador sent by Seleucus to the 
court of Chandragupta was Megasthenes, who 
wrote an account of India which became the chief 
source of information for subsequent Greek and 
Latin authors. The work itself is lost, but 
numerous fragments of it have been preserved in 
the form of quotations by later writers. 

Among these quotations we find descriptions 
of very great historical value. The capital, 
Pataliputra, was, according to Megasthenes, built 
in the form of a large parallelogram 80 stadia long 
and 15 stadia wide. That is to say, the city was 
more than 9 miles in length and more than ij 
miles in width. It was surrounded by a wall 
which had 570 towers and 64 gates, and by a moat 
600 feet wide and 30 cubits deep. At the present 
time excavations are being made by the Archaeo- 
logical Survey of India on the ancient site of 
Pataliputra, as the result of which discoveries of 
the highest interest may be anticipated. 

To Megasthenes also we are indebted for a detailed 



THE MAURYA EMPIRE 103 

account of the administration of public affairs in 
this imperial city ; and this account is supplemented 
and confirmed in a very remarkable manner by a 
Sanskrit treatise on the conduct of affairs of state, 
called the Artha-gdstra^ the authorship of which 
is attributed to Chanakya, who appears as the 
Brahman prime minister of Chandragupta in the 
Mudra-rdkshasa^ and who has won for himself the 
reputation of having been 4he Machiavelli of India.' 
It has been well said (V. A. Smith, Early History 
of India^ second edition, p. 119), that we are more 
fully informed concerning political and municipal 
institutions in the reign of Chandragupta, than in 
that of any subsequent Indian monarch until the 
time of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, who was 
contemporary with our Queen Elizabeth. 

The reign of Chandragupta lasted from about 
321 to 297 B.C. He was succeeded by a son who 
is called Bindusara in Indian literature and who was 
probably known to Greek writers by one of his 
titles as Amitrochates (Sanskrit Amitraghdta\ ' the 
slayer of his foes.' There is little information to 
be obtained about him either from Indian or from 
Greek sources. In his reign another Syrian ambas- 
sador named Daimachus, sent by Antiochus I Soter 
(280-261 B.C.), the successor of Seleucus, visited 
the court of Pataliputra. He also wrote an 
account of India, which has been lost. We there- 



I04 ANCIENT INDIA 

fore have no means of judging of the truth of 
Strabo's statement, when he says that of all the 
Greek writers on India Daimachus ranked first in 
mendacity. 

Of a third ambassador, who came to India from 
the West at some time during this period, we know 
merely the name — Dionysius — and that he was 
sent from the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus, king 
of Egypt (285-247 B.C.). 

The three ambassadors, whose names have been 
preserved, are no doubt typical of a class. It is 
in every way probable that constant relations were 
maintained between India and the West during the 
period of the Maurya empire. There is positive 
evidence of the continuation of such relations 
during the reign of the next emperor — the most 
renowned of the imperial line — Agoka, the son of 
Bindusara, who reigned c. 269-227 B.C. 

Agoka's fame rests chiefly on the position which 
he held as the great patron of Buddhism. As such 
he has often been compared to Constantine the 
Great, the royal patron of Roman Christianity- 
The hterary sources for the history of Agoka's 
reign — Brahman, Jain, and Buddhist — are indeed 
abundant. But his very fame has, in many cases, 
caused these materials to assume a legendary or 
miraculous character. He has suffered both from 
the enthusiasm of friends and from the misrepre- 



THE MAURY A EMPIRE 105 

sentations of foes. The Buddhist accounts of his 
Hfe have come down to us in two great collections 
of religious books — those written in Pali and 
preserved in Ceylon, and those written in Sanskrit 
and preserved in Nepal. In the case of both of 
these, an undoubted substratum of fact is so much 
hidden by a dense overgrowth of legend, that the 
historian is sorely perplexed in his efforts to dis- 
tinguish the one from the other. 

Fortunately, there exists a source of informa- 
tion which is beyond dispute — inscriptions cut 
into hard rocks or pillars of stone by command of 
the king himself, and, in many instances, record- 
ing his own words. We have already had 
occasion to speak of these wonderful inscriptions. 
Their object was ethical and religious rather than 
historical or political. They inculcate good 
government among the rulers, and obedience and 
good conduct among the governed, and these 
virtues as the fruit of the observance of dhamma 
(Skt. dharmd) or 'duty,' a term which, in this 
case, since Acoka was a follower of Buddha, is 
probably identical with the eight-fold path of 
Buddhism. In striking contrast to the inscriptions 
of Darius, the edicts of Agoka were intended not 
to convey to posterity the record of conquests or 
of the extent of a mighty empire, but to further 
the temporal and spiritual welfare of his subjects. 



io6 ANCIENT INDIA 

They proclaim in so many words that " the 
chief conquest is the conquest of 'duty.'" One 
material conquest — that of the kingdom of 
Kaliriga — they do indeed record ; but this is 
expressly cited as an instance of the worthlessness 
of conquest by force when compared with the 
conquest which comes of the performance of 
' duty,' and it is coupled with an expression of 
bitter regret for the destruction and the misery 
which the war entailed. Surely, imperial edicts of 
this description, engraved as they are in the most 
permanent form and promulgated throughout the 
length and breadth of a great empire, are unique 
in the history of the world. 

Of peculiar interest is the inscribed pillar which 
was erected by Agoka to mark the traditional 
birth-place of Buddha. This was discovered 
in 1896 at Rummindei in the Nepalese 
Tarai, with every letter still as perfect as when 
it was first engraved. The modern name of the 
place still continues to represent the ' Lumbini ' 
grove of the ancient story of Buddha's birth. 

But, although the edicts and the other inscrip- 
tions of Agoka are not historical in character, yet 
they supply, incidentally, evidence of the most 
valuable kind for the history of the time. 

In the first place, the extent of the Maurya 
empire during the reign of A9oka is indicated by 



THE MAURYA EMPIRE 107 

their geographical distribution. They are found, 
usually at ancient places of pilgrimage, from the 
N.-W. Frontier Province in the extreme north of 
India to Mysore in the south, and from Kathiawar 
in the west to Orissa. That is to say, they show 
that the sway of Agoka extended over the whole 
length and breadth of the continent of India, with 
the exception of the extreme south of the peninsula. 
It is extremely probable also that versions of the 
edicts will be found in Southern Afghanistan, when 
it is possible to pursue archaeological investigations 
in that region. 

The geographical knowledge thus gleaned is 
supplemented by the mention in the inscriptions 
of the peoples living on the northern and southern 
fringes of the empire. In the north, Agoka 
regarded his empire as conterminous with that of 
the Greek (Yona) king Antiochus, that is to say, 
the Seleucid king, Antiochus II Theos (261- 
246 B.C.). His neighbours in the extreme south 
were the rulers of the Tamil kingdoms, four of 
which are mentioned by name. Three of these 
kingdoms, which can be identified with certainty, 
played an important part in later Indian history. 
The inscriptions also mention Ceylon (Tamba- 
panni). We are thus, for the first time in the 
history of India, supplied with information which 
would enable us to give some description of the 



io8 ANCIENT INDIA 

geography of the whole continent from Afghani- 
stan to Ceylon. 

We also learn incidentally that this great 
empire was governed by viceroys who ruled over 
large provinces in the North- West, the South, 
the East, and the West. The central districts were 
probably under the direct rule of the emperor at 
Pataliputra. 

We find, further, evidence of the continuance 
of that intercourse between India and the West, 
which, as we know from Greek authorities, was 
maintained during the reigns of Chandragupta 
and Bindusara. Agoka was a zealous Buddhist 
He was not satisfied with having the 'law of 
duty ' preached everywhere among his subjects 
and among the independent peoples of Southern 
India and Ceylon ; but he states in one of his 
edicts that he had sent his missionaries even into 
the Hellenic kingdoms of Syria, Egypt, Cyrene, 
Macedonia, and Epirus. He mentions by name 
the reigning sovereigns of these kingdoms, and 
thereby supplies some most valuable chronological 
evidence for the history of his own reign, since 
the dates of most of these Hellenic kings are 
known with certainty. 

During the reign of Agoka, Buddhism was 
estabHshed in the island of Ceylon, where it still 
continues to flourish hundreds of years after it 



THE MAURYA EMPIRE 109 

has disappeared from every part of the continent 
of India except Nepal. The ruler of the island 
at this period was Tissa (c. 247-207 B.C.) whose 
title Devdnampiya, ' dear to the gods,' is that 
which is used by A9oka himself in his inscriptions 
and may possibly have been borrowed from him. 
The conversion of the island to Buddhism is 
attributed by the Ceylonese chronicles to the son 
of A^oka, Mahinda, who had become a Buddhist 
monk. 

In his latter years the emperor A^oka himself 
became a monk, living in seclusion at Suvarnagiri, 
a sacred mountain, near the ancient city of 
Girivraja in Magadha (S. Bihar). Like many of 
the Indian monarchs of old whose story is told in 
the Sanskrit epics, he retired to devote the final 
stage of life to religious meditation, after having 
first transferred the cares of state to his heir 
apparent. This prince is mentioned in an edict 
which Agoka issued from Suvarnagiri, but only by 
his title. We have no means of identifying him 
farther, or of knowing if he succeeded to the 
throne on the death of Agoka. 

For the subsequent history of the Maurya 
empire, we have no such authorities, literary or 
inscriptional, as those which enable us to under- 
stand so fully the social and political conditions of 
India during the reigns of Chandragupta and 



no ANCIENT INDIA 

Agoka. We are once more dependent almost 
entirely on the testimony of the Puranas and the 
chronicles of the Jains and Buddhists — sources 
which are only partly in agreement with one 
another, and which at best afford little more than 
the names of the successors of A9oka and the 
length of their reigns. 

Five of the Puranas agree in the statement 
that the Maurya dynasty lasted for 137 years. 
If we accept this statement we may date the end 
of the dynasty in ^. 184 B.C. They are not in 
complete agreement either as to the names or the 
number of Agoka's successors. Two of the 
Puranas agree in stating that his immediate 
successors were a son and grandson who reigned 
each for a period of eight years. The latter of 
these is probably the Dagaratha whose name 
occurs in some cave-inscriptions in the Nagarjuni 
Hills in the Gaya district of Bengal. These 
inscriptions show that Dagaratha had continued 
the patronage which Acoka had bestowed on a 
sect of Jain ascetics called Ajivikas. 

It is possible that the Puranas may be right in 
recording that some six or seven successors of 
Agoka sat on the throne of Magadha ; but, if so, 
it is certain that most of these successors could 
only have ruled over an empire very greatly 
diminished in extent or, perhaps, even reduced to 



THE M AURYA EMPIRE 1 1 1 

the kingdom of Magadha out of which it had 
grown. 

It is interesting in reviewing the past history of 
India to trace a remarkable continuity of policy on 
the part of the rulers of whatever nationality who 
have succeeded in welding together this great 
congeries of widely differing races and tongues. 
The main principles of government have remained 
unchanged throughout the ages. Such as they 
were under the Maurya empire, so they were 
inherited by the Muhammadan rulers and by their 
successors the British. These principles are based 
on the recognition of a social system which depends 
ultimately on a self-organized village community. 
Local government thus forms the very basis of all 
political systems in India. The grouping of 
village communities into states, and the grouping 
of states into empires has left the social system 
unchanged. All governments have been obliged 
to recognize an infinite variety among the governed 
of social customs and of religious beliefs, too 
firmly grounded to admit of interference. Thus 
the idea of religious toleration which was of slow 
growth in Europe was accepted in India generally 
from the earliest times. All religious communities 
were alike under the protection of the sovereign ; 
and inscriptions plainly show that, when the 
government changed hands, the privileges granted 



112 ANCIENT INDIA 

to religious communities were ratified by the new 
sovereign as a matter of course. In a special 
edict devoted to the subject of religious toleration 
Agoka definitely says that his own practice was to 
reverence all sects. In this edict he deprecates 
the habit of exalting one's own views at the 
expense of others, and admits that different people 
have different ideas as to what constitutes 'duty' 
{dharmd). Such has been the attitude of en- 
hghtened rulers of India in all ages. Instances of 
religious persecution have, indeed, not been wanting 
in India; but the tolerant policy of Agoka was 
that of the most capable and far-seeing of the 
Muhammadan rulers such as Akbar, and it has 
always been that of the British government, which, 
like Agoka, has only interfered with religion when 
it has entailed practices which conflict with the 
ordinary principles of humanity. 



CHAPTER VIII 

INDIA AFTER THE DECLINE OF THE MAURYA 

EMPIRE 

Dismemberment of the Empire — The ^uiigas — The Kingdom 
of KaHnga — The Andhras — The Hellenic Kingdoms of 
Bactria and Parthia — The Indian invasion of Antiochus the 
Great. 

Another lesson which is enforced by the history 
of the Maurya empire is that the maintenance of 
peace, and of those conditions which are essential 
to progress, depends in India on the existence of 
a strong imperial power. On the downfall of 
the Maurya empire, as on the downfall of the 
Mughal empire nearly two thousand years later, 
the individual states which had been peacefully 
united under the imperial sway regained their 
independence, and the struggle between them for 
existence or for supremacy began anew. The 
literature and the monuments afford us some 
information as to the history of various regions of 
India during the period of strife and confusion 
which now ensued. 

According to the Puranas the Mauryas were 

H ^3 



114 ANCIENT INDIA 

succeeded on the throne of Magadha by the 
^ungas who are said to have ruled for 112 years 
{c. 184-72 B.C.). There is no reason to disbelieve 
this statement which is consonant with probability 
and with such other evidence as we possess ; but, 
after this period, it seems impossible to make the 
chronology of the Puranas agree with the more 
trustworthy evidence of inscriptions and coins. 
In this case it seems probable that the dynastic 
lists were originally authentic, but that later 
editors have reduced them to absurdity by re- 
presenting contemporary dynasties as successive. 

The founder of the ^unga dynasty was 
Pushyamitra who is said to have slain his master, 
Brihadratha, the last of the royal Mauryas. An 
historical play, the Mdlavikdgnimitra^ by India's 
greatest dramatist, Kalidasa, who flourished c. 400 
A.D., deals with this period. Although a com- 
position of this kind, written between five and six 
centuries after the date of the events to which it 
refers, cannot be accepted as historical evidence, 
yet it is altogether probable that its chief char- 
acters — Pushyamitra, his son Agnimitra, and his 
grandson Vasumitra — were historical personages, 
and that some of the events mentioned — a war 
with Vidarbha (Berar) and a conflict with the 
Yavanas, for instance — were actual occurrences. 
The picture of a diminished empire still possessed 



INDIA AFTER THE MAURYA EMPIRE 115 

by Magadha is in accordance with the knowledge 
of the period which we derive from more trust- 
worthy sources. The king probably still reigned 
at the capital, Pataliputra, while his son, the 
heir-apparent, like Agoka before he came to the 
throne, governed the western provinces with his 
court at Vidiga (Bhilsa) in Malwa (Central India). 
It was before the vice-regal court of the same 
province and at its capital, Ujjain, that the play 
was first performed during the reign of the later 
Gupta emperor, Chandragupta II Vikramaditya 

(^- 375-413 A.D.). 

The extent of the (Jufiga dominions is indicated 
by an inscription ' in the sovereignty of the 
(^unga kings ' which occurs on one of the sculp- 
tures from the Bharhut tope in the Nagod State 
(Central India), and possibly also by certain coins 
found in the United Provinces in Rohilkhand, the 
ancient kingdom of North Pafichala, and on the 
site of Ayodhya, the ancient capital of Kosala 
(Oudh) ; but the na:y:es found on these coins, with 
the single exception of ' Agnimitra,' only bear a 
general resemblance with those given in the dyn- 
astic lists and cannot be identified with certainty. 

The available evidence thus tends to show that 
Magadha under the ^ungas still possessed an 
empire, but one greatly reduced in size since the 
time of Agoka. Some of the losses which the 



it6 ancient INDIA 

empire had sustained are clearly proved by the 
evidence of inscriptions and coins. 

The kingdom of Kalinga, on the east coast 
between the rivers Mahanadi and Godavari, had, 
as we know from Agoka's edicts, been conquered 
by him in the ninth year after his coronation. 
It would seem to have regained its independence 
at no long interval after his death, according to 
evidence supplied by an inscription of Kharavela, 
king of Kalinga, in the Hathigumpha cave near 
Cuttack in Orissa. Unfortunately, the inscription, 
which gives an account of events in the first 
thirteen years of the king's reign, is much 
damaged, and its interpretation is full of difficul- 
ties. What appears to be beyond all doubt is the 
statement that Kharavela belonged to the third 
generation of the royal family of Kalinga. The 
mention of an Andhra king, Catakarni, and such 
other chronological indications as can be obtained 
from the inscription, would seem to suggest that 
Kharavela was reigning c, 150 B.C. No more 
precise date is obtainable at present. 

The decline of the Maurya empire was marked 
also by the rapid growth of the Andhra kingdom 
in Southern India. Originally a Dravidian people 
living immediately to the south of the Kalihgas 
in that part of the Madras Presidency which hes 
between the rivers Godavari and Kistna, the 



INDIA AFTER THE MAURYA EMPIRE 117 

Andhras had become, probably about 200 b.c, 
a great power whose territories included the whole 
of the Deccan and extended to the western coast. 
They are mentioned in the edicts in a manner 
which seems to indicate that they acknowledged 
the suzerainty of Agoka, but that they were 
never conquered and brought under the direct 
government of a viceroy of the empire like 
their neighbours the Kalingas. They would 
seem to have asserted their independence soon 
after the death of Agoka. Some outline of 
their history may be traced by the aid of in- 
scriptions, coins, and literary sources from prob- 
ably about 220 B.C. to 240 A.D. The names of 
a succession of thirty kings are preserved in the 
Puranas, together with the length of each reign, 
and the total duration of the dynasty which is 
given either as 456 or as 460 years. The 
Puranas are, usually, fairly in agreement with 
the evidence of inscriptions and coins, so far as 
the names of the kings and the length of their 
reigns are concerned ; but they assign to the 
dynasty a chronological position which is im- 
possible. 

There can be httle doubt also that, contem- 
poraneously with the rise of the independent 
kingdoms of the Kalingas and the Andhras in 
the South, the North-Western region of India, 



ii8 ANCIENT INDIA 

too, ceased to belong to the Maurya empire. We 
have no glimpses of the history of this defection ; 
but we may reasonably assume that the numerous 
petty states which had been held together for a 
time by the imperial power reasserted their 
autonomy when that power ceased. 

During the reign of Agoka two revolts occurred 
in the empire of Syria which were fruitful in 
consequences for the future history of India. 
Almost at the same time, about 250 B.C. or a 
few years later, Diodotus, satrap of Bactria, 
and a Parthian adventurer named Arsaces threw 
off their allegiance to the Seleucid monarch, 
Antiochus II Theos (261-246 B.C.), and founded 
the independent kingdoms of Bactria and Parthia. 

Bactria — the name is preserved in the modern 
form Balkh — was the region of N. Afghanistan, 
bounded on the north by the river Oxus. It was 
divided from the Maurya empire by the Hindu 
Kush — a range of mountains which, lofty as 
are many of its peaks, possesses also numerous 
passes, and forms no very formidable barrier to 
communication between Northern and Southern 
Afghanistan. The Hellenic kingdom of Bactria 
founded by Diodotus lasted till about 135 b.c, 
when its civilization was entirely swept away by 
the irresistible flood of Scythian (^aka) invasion 
from the North. Its brief history of a little 



INDIA AFTER THE MAURYA EMPIRE 119 

more than a century is most intimately asso- 
ciated with that of the North-Western region 
of India. 

Parthia, originally a province lying to the 
south-east of the Caspian Sea, grew into a great 
empire at the expense of the empire of Syria, 
which, once the predominant power in Western 
Asia, was at last reduced to the province of 
Syria from which it takes its name. The 
Parthian power lasted till 226 a.d. In the 
reign of Mithradates I (i 71-138 b.c.) it ex- 
tended as far eastwards as the river Indus 
which thus became once more the dividing line 
between Western Asia and India. The Parthian 
and Scythian invasions of India, which, at a some- 
what later period, constitute the chief feature in 
the history of the North-Western region are 
dealt with in our final chapter. 

But the Syrian empire did not acquiesce with- 
out a protest in the independence of its revolted 
provinces. About the year 209 B.C., Antiochus 
III the Great, made an attempt to reduce both 
Parthia and Bactria to obedience. Parthia was 
now under the rule of the king who has 
usually, but perhaps incorrectly, been called 
Artabanus I (2 10- 191 B.C.), while Bactria was 
under Euthydemus {c. 230-195 B.C.). The ex- 
pedition of Antiochus ended in an acknowledge- 



I20 ANCIENT INDIA 

ment of the independence of both kingdoms. So 
far as Bactria is concerned, Antiochus is said to 
have listened to the argument of Euthydemus 
that it would at the present juncture be impolitic, 
in the cause of Hellenic civilization generally, to 
weaken the power of Bactria which formed a 
barrier against the constant menace of Scythian 
irruptions from the North. 

Bactria was, indeed, a stronghold of Hellenic 
civilization. It was held by a military aristocracy, 
thoroughly Greek in sentiment and religion, ruling 
over a subject people so httle advanced in culture 
that its ideas are in no way reflected in the monu- 
ments of Bactrian art. The coins of Bactria are 
purely Greek in character, the divinities repre- 
sented on them are Greek, and the portraits of 
the kings themselves are among the finest ex- 
amples extant of Greek art as applied to 
portraiture. But the kingdom was short-lived 
and its history was troublous. The house of the 
founder, Diodotus, was deposed by Euthydemus, 
perhaps about 230 B.C., and the later history of 
Bactria is occupied with the internecine struggle 
between the descendants of Euthydemus and the 
rival family of Eucratides. 

After thus making a treaty of peace with 
Euthydemus, Antiochus, like his predecessors, 
Alexander in 327 B.C., and Seleucus c. 305 b.c. 



INDIA AFTER THE MAURY A EMPIRE 121 

passed over the Hindu Kush into the Kabul Valley. 
No exact details of this invasion or of its extent 
have been preserved ; but it seems clear that this 
region, which formed part of the Maurya empire 
when Seleucus invaded it, had, at some time 
subsequent to the death of A^oka, reverted to the 
rule of its local princes, one of whom, Sophagasenus 
(probably the Sanskrit Subhagasena)^ is said to 
have purchased peace by offering tribute to 
Antiochus. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT 

The records literary and numismatic — Bactrian conquests in 
India — Invasion of Bactria by Mithradates — Bactria 
occupied by the ^akas and the Yueh-chi — Greek kings in 
India — The house of Euthydemus and the house of 
Eucratides— Menander — Allusions to Greeks in Sanskrit 
literature — Greek influence in India. 

The political condition of India on the downfall 

of the Maurya empire was such as to invite 

foreign invasion; and the establishment on its 

northern and north-western borders of the 

kingdoms of Bactria and Parthia supplied the 

sources from which invasions came. 

The literary authorities for the history of this 

period are indeed few ; but they aiford some 

most valuable information. The most important 

are : — (i) Justin, a Latin writer who, in the fourth 

or fifth century a.d., made an abridgement of 

a history of the Macedonian empire compiled by 

Trogus in the reign of Augustus (27 B.C.- 14 a.d.); 

and (2) the Greek geographer Strabo, who was 

probably contemporary with Trogus. 
122 



THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER 123 

The chief records, however, of the rulers of 
this period are their coins, which are found in 
extraordinary variety and abundance. From them 
we learn of the existence of thirty-five kings and 
two queens, all bearing purely Greek names, who 
reigned in Bactria and India during the period from 
about 250 B.C. to 25 B.C. The great majority of 
these rulers are otherwise unknown. The coins 
which they struck have survived, while every other 
memorial of their lives has perished. A curious 
fact connected with this series of coins is that 
certain specimens struck in Bactria before 200 b.c. 
are of nickel, a metal which is commonly supposed 
to have been discovered in Europe about the 
middle of the eighteenth century a.d. 

Not long after the expedition ot Antiochus 
the Great, the Bactrian king Euthydemus seems 
to have formed the design of extending his 
kingdom by the conquest of the territories lying 
to the south of the Hindu Kush. It is probable 
that the fulfilment of this design was entrusted to 
his son Demetrius, who has been supposed to be 
the original of 

* The grete Emetreus, the king of Inde ' 

of Chaucer's Knigbtes Tale. 

As a result of the conquests of Demetrius, the 
ancient provinces of the Persian empire, i.e. the 



124 ANCIENT INDIA 

Kabul Valley and the country of the Indus (the 
Western Punjab and Sind), which had been once 
reclaimed and held for a brief period by Alexander 
the Great, were now again recovered for the Greek 
kings of Bactria who proudly boasted to be his 
successors. 

But though Demetrius had thus gained a new 
kingdom in India, he was soon to lose his own 
kingdom of Bactria after a desperate struggle with 
his rival Eucratides, who now laid claim to the 
throne. The account of an episode in this contest 
has been preserved by Justin, who describes how 
Eucratides with 300 men was besieged by 
Demetrius with 60,000, and how he wore out the 
enemy by continual sorties and escaped in the 
fifth month of the siege. Finally, not only Bactria 
but also some part of the newly acquired Indian 
dominions of Demetrius passed into the power of 
the conqueror, Eucratides ; and from this time 
onwards we may trace the existence of two lines 
of Greek princes in India, the one derived from 
Euthydemus, ending c. 100 B.C., and the other 
derived from Eucratides, ending ^.25 B.C. 

The period of the reign of Eucratides is 
determined by the statement of Justin that he 
came to the throne at about the same time as 
MIthradates I of Parthia, i.e. about 171 B.C. It 
is doubtful if Demetrius or any other member of 



THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER 125 

the family of Euthydemus ruled in any part of 
Bactria after this date. It is more probable that 
henceforth their power was confined to India. The 
family of Eucratides, on the other hand, continued 
to rule both in Bactria and in India until Greek 
civilization in Bactria was swept away by the flood 
of Caka invasions from the North c. 135 b.c; but 
they retained their possessions in the territories 
to the south of the Hindu Kush, and held the 
Kabul Valley until the Kushana conquest, 
c. 25 B.C. 

The transference of Greek rule from Bactria to 
India is indicated, in the most unmistakable 
manner, by a change in the style of the coins. In 
Bactria the coins remain purely Greek in character, 
and they are struck in accordance with a purely 
Greek standard of weight. The subject popula- 
tion was evidently not sufficiently advanced in 
civilization to influence the art of the conquerors 
in any degree. In India, on the other hand, 
where the Greeks came into contact with an 
ancient civilization, which was, in many respects, 
as advanced as their own, it was necessary to 
effect a compromise. It was essential that the 
coinage should be suited to the requirements of 
the conquered as well as of the conquerors. The 
coins, accordingly, become bilingual. They are 
struck with Greek legends on the obverse^ and 



126 ANCIENT INDIA 

with an Indian translation in Indian characters on 
the reverse ; and they follow the Persian standard 
of weight which had been firmly established in 
N.-W. India as a result of the long Persian 
dominion. We have already seen how valuable 
the study of these bilingual coins has proved in 
affording the necessary clue to the interpretation 
of the forgotten alphabets of Ancient India. 

During the reign of Eucratides, Bactria was 
invaded by the Parthian king, Mithradates I 
(171-138 B.C.), who seems to have remained 
master of the country for some considerable time. 
It is probable that certain coins which bear his 
name, and which are palpably imitated, some from 
the Bactrian coins of Demetrius and some from 
those of Eucratides, may have been struck by him 
in Bactria during this period. There is reason 
for supposing that Mithradates, on this occasion, 
penetrated even into India. In the printed text 
of the works of Orosius, a Roman historian who 
flourished c. 400 a.d., there is indeed to be found 
a definite statement to the effect that Mithradates 
subdued the nations between the Hydaspes 
(Jhelum) and the Indus; but it seems possible 
that the reading 'Hydaspes' may be incorrect 
and due to some corruption in the manuscripts of 
the name of a river not in India, but in Persia to 
the west of the Indus. 



THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER 127 

Thus weakened, on the one hand, by internal 
feuds and by Parthian attacks, and, on the other, 
by the drain on its resources caused by the Indian 
conquests, the Greek kingdom of Bactria proved 
incapable of resisting the hordes of Scythians who 
burst through its northern frontiers c. 135 B.C. 
These represented one of the groups of nomadic 
tribes known as (^akas, who still occupied, as in 
the time of Darius (522-486 e.g.), the country ot 
the river Jaxartes (Syr Darya) to the north 
of Sogdiana (Bukhara). They had always been 
regarded as a standing menace to the Greek 
civilization of Bactria, and now, being driven from 
their pastures by the pressure of other nomadic 
hordes whom the Chinese historians call Yueh-chi, 
they were forced partly in a southerly direction 
into Bactria, and partly in a south-westerly direc- 
tion into the Parthian empire where they joined 
with an earlier settlement of (^akas in the province 
of Drangiana (Seistan). Traces of the existence of 
this earlier ^aka settlement in Drangiana seem to 
be found both in the inscriptions of Darius and in 
the accounts of Alexander's campaigns. The 
vital importance for the history of N.-W. India of 
this augmentation of the ^aka power already 
established in a province of the Parthian Empire 
will be seen subsequently (p. 137). 

The Yueh-chi, thus driving the fakas before 



128 ANCIENT INDIA 

them, seem to have occupied first Sogdiana and 
then Bactria, where, under the leadership of their 
chief tribe, the Kushanas, they developed into the 
strong power which created the next great Indian 
empire. 

It is only possible to give a very general outline 
of the history of the Greek kingdoms south of 
the Hindu Kush. Nearly all the evidence which 
we possess has been gleaned from the study of their 
coinages ; and the interpretation of this evidence is 
by no means always clear. As has been observed, 
these Greek princes seem to belong chiefly to the 
two rival royal lines — the house of Euthydemus, 
and the house of Eucratides — which having begun 
their struggle in Bactria continued it in India. It 
is, however, not alw^ays easy to attribute princes 
whose coins we possess to either of these groups ; 
and it is quite possible that, in addition to these 
two chief Greek kingdoms in Northern India, 
there may have been other principahties which 
Greek soldiers of fortune had carved out for 
themselves. 

The Indian conquests of Demetrius, the son of 
Euthydemus, were greatly extended by later 
rulers of the same house, notably by Apollodotus 
and Menander. That these two princes were 
intimately connected there can be no doubt. 
They use the same coin-types, especially the 



THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER 129 

figure of the Greek goddess, Athene, hurling the 
thunderbolt, which is characteristic of other 
members of the family of Euthydemus, e.g. the 
Stratos ; and they are twice mentioned together in 
literature. Strabo attributes conquests in India to 
them jointly, while the unknown author of the 
Periplus ?naris Erythrai — a most interesting hand- 
book intended for the use of Greek merchants 
and seamen as a guide to the coasting voyage 
from the Persian Gulf to the west coast of India — 
states that small silver coins, inscribed with Greek 
characters and bearing the names of these two 
princes, were still current in his time (probably 
c. 80 A.D.) at the port of Barugaza (Broach). 
The extent of Menander's dominions especially is 
indicated both by the great variety of his coin- 
types which prove that he ruled over a great 
number of different provinces, and by a statement 
quoted by Strabo to the eifect that he passed 
beyond the Hyphasis (Beas) which formed the 
extreme limit of Alexander's conquests. 

We have, in all probability, further information 
concerning Menander from a source which, at 
first sight, might seem not very promising from 
the point of view of the historian. Menander is 
almost certainly to be identified with the King 
Milinda, who is known from a Buddhist philosophi- 
cal treatise called the ^Questions of Milinda' 
I 



I30 ANCIENT INDIA 

{Milinda-Fanhd). This monarch resided at Qakala, 
an ancient city which has been identified with the 
modern Sialkot in the N.E. Punjab. Now, we have 
direct evidence that other members of the house of 
Euthydemus (the Stratos) reigned to the S.E. of the 
Punjab, since their coins are imitated by their Qaka 
conquerors who occupied the district of Mathura 
(Muttra). We may conclude, then, that the family 
of Euthydemus ruled over the E. Punjab, with 
one of its capitals at Sialkot and possibly another 
capital in the Muttra Dist of the United Provinces. 

But the evidence both of coins and of literature 
shows that, at one period, they possessed a far 
wider dominion. The fact that the coins of 
Apollodotus and Menander were current at Broach, 
surely indicates that their conquests must have 
extended to Western India (Gujarat and Kathia- 
war) ; while the statement in Strabo, that 
Menander passed beyond the Beas into the 
Middle Country, is supported by certain references 
in Sanskrit Hterature to the warlike activity of the 
Yavanas (Greeks) about the middle of the second 
century b.c. The best known of these allusions 
are the following : — 

(i) Kalidasa's historical play, the Malavlkdgni- 
mitra^ represents the forces of the first Quhga 
king, Pushyamitra, under the command of his 
grandson, Vasumitra, as coming into conflict with 



THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER 131 

the Yavanas somewhere in Central India. This 
may well be the reminiscence of some episode in 
Menander's invasion of the Cufiga dominions. 

(2) The grammarian Patanjali, in his Mahd- 
bhdshya or ' Great Commentary ' on Panini's 
Sanskrit Grammar, mentions King Pushyamitra 
as if he were his contemporary, and refers to the 
sieges by the Yavanas of Saketa in South Oudh and 
of Madhyamika (Nagari) near Chitor in Rajputana 
as if they had taken place within his own memory. 

(3) Perhaps the fullest of all the accounts of 
the Greeks in India at this period occurs in an 
astronomical, or rather astrological, treatise called 
the Gdrgi Samhitd^ or 'the compendium of Garga.' 
One of its chapters is in the style of a Purana ; 
that is to say, it gives in a prophetic form an 
account of kings who have already ruled on the 
earth. Unfortunately this work has not yet been 
fully edited and the manuscript of it which has 
been described is both fragmentary and corrupt. 
Put into historic form the information which the 
certain portions of this chapter yield may be ex- 
pressed as follows : — 

The Greeks after reducing Saketa, the Paiichala 
country and Muttra (all in the United Provinces) 
reached the capital Pataliputra (Patna). But they 
did not stay in the Middle Country because of the 
strife between themselves which took place in 



132 ANCIENT INDIA 

their own kingdom (North-Western India). They 
were eventually conquered by a (Jaka king ; and 
in time the ^akas yielded to another conquering 
power, the name of which is obscured by textual 
corruption in the manuscript. 

This account no doubt refers successively to the 
internecine struggle between the house of Euthy- 
demus and the house of Eucratides, to the 
conquest of Greek kingdoms by the Qakas, and 
to the subsequent conquest of the Qakas by the 
Kushanas. The Gargi Samhita holds an almost 
unique position in the literature of Ancient India, 
and it is much to be regretted that no edition of 
this interesting work is at present possible. It is 
almost the only surviving representative of the old 
Hindu astrology or astronomy, which was super- 
seded, probably in the fourth century a.d., by the 
Greek system of astronomy borrowed, presumably, 
from Alexandria. The later Indian astronomers 
frequently refer to Vriddha Garga, 'the old 
Garga,' and there is no reason to doubt that the 
compendium which bears his name belongs to a 
period not much later than that of the foreign 
invaders whom it mentions. The information 
conveyed by the chapter to which we have 
referred is in accordance with the knowledge of 
this period which we may glean independently 
from other sources. 



THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER 133 

The territories on the extreme north-western 
frontier of India, i.e. the Kabul Valley and 
Gandhara (including Taxila) which were origin- 
ally conquered by Euthydemus or by Demetrius, 
were wrested from this family of Greek princes by 
Eucratides. Evidence of the transfer of this 
region from one rule to the other is afforded by 
certain coins which have been restruck. Origin- 
ally they were issued by Apollodotus, a prince of 
the house of Euthydemus ; but they have been 
restruck by Eucratides ; and, as they bear the 
image and superscription of the tutelary deity of 
Kapiga, the capital city of Gandhara, they testify 
to the change of government which had taken 
place in this province. 

Inscriptions and coins show further that the 
family of Eucratides was supplanted by Qaka 
satraps in both Kapiga and Taxila ; but these 
princes continued to hold the Kabul Valley until 
the last vestiges of their rule, which had survived 
the attacks of the Qakas, were swept away by 
the Kushanas. The last Greek king to reign in 
the Kabul Valley, and indeed in any region of 
India, was Hermasus who was succeeded, c. 25 
A.D., by the Kushana chief, Kujula Kadphises. 

It is a curious fact that, while the coinages 
of the Grseco-Indian princes are remarkably 
abundant, all other memorials of their rule should 



134 



ANCIENT INDIA 



be so rare. Only one stone inscription, for 
instance, has yet been found in which any of 
these princes is mentioned. This inscription is at 
Besnagar in Gwalior, and the prince mentioned is 
Antialcidas who, to judge from the evidence of 
coins, was one of the earher members of the Hne 
of Eucratides, and who ruled both in Bactria and 
in the Kabul Valley. The inscription records the 
erection of a standard in honour of the god 
Vishnu ; and it is especially interesting as showing 
that the donor, a Greek named Heliodorus, the 
son of Dion, who had come to Besnagar as an 
ambassador from Antialcidas, had adopted an 
Indian faith. The inscription is dated in the 
14th year of the reign of a king Bhagabhadra 
who presumably ruled over the province in 
which Besnagar was situated. As this region no 
doubt formed part of the empire of the Qufigas, 
it is not improbable that this King Bhagabhadra 
may be identical with the Bhadra or Bhadraka 
who is mentioned in some of the Puranas among 
the successors of Pushyamitra. 

It is to the period of nearly two centuries 
{c. 200-25 B.C.) during which Greek princes 
ruled in the Kabul Valley, the North- Western 
Frontier Province, and the Punjab, and not to the 
expedition of Alexander the Great (^2>'^y-S B.C.), 
the political results of which lasted only for a few 



PLATE III. 




THE TJliSNAGAR COLUMN. 



[SiY/a£-e 156. 



THE SUCCESSORS OF ALEXANDER 135 

years, that we must trace the chief source of 
Greek influence in Northern India. For some 
centuries after the extinction of all their political 
power, we find Greeks mentioned in Indian 
literature and Indian inscriptions. But they have 
been absorbed into the Indian social system. 
They bear Indian or Persian names, and they 
profess Indian faiths. The existence of a strong 
Greek element in the population is attested by 
the Buddhist art of Gandhara, in which the 
influence of Greek traditions is manifest ; and a 
system of writing developed from the Greek 
alphabet is to be traced in this region until at 
least the fourth century a.d., and possibly much 
later. 



CHAPTER X 

PARTHIAN AND SCYTHIAN INVADERS 

Cakas and Pahlavas — Their Parthian Origin — Progress of 
^aka conquests in India — Caka satrapies — Defeat of the 
^akas by a king of Malwa and the establishment of the 
Vikrama era — Gondopharnes — Progress of Kushana power 
Establishment of the Kushana empire — The era of 
Kanishka. 

So far, we have traced the history of the Yavanas 
(Yonas), or foreign invaders of Greek descent, in 
North-Western India. The history of this region 
is now comphcated by the appearance on the 
scene of invaders belonging to two other nation- 
ahties, who are constantly associated with the 
Yavanas in Indian literature and inscriptions. 
These are the (Jakas and Pahlavas. 

Herodotus expressly states that the term 
' Qakas ' was used by the Persians to denote 
Scythians generally ; and this statement is 
certainly in accordance with the use of the word 
in the inscriptions of Darius. In one of these, 
it occurs together with descriptions which show 
that it denotes certain Scythians in Europe as well 

136 



PARTHIAN & SCYTHIAN INVADERS 137 

as two branches of Scythians in Asia. These, we 
have reason to believe, are specimens merely of 
the innumerable swarms of nomads which had 
been finding their way during untold centuries 
from that great hive of humanity, China, to 
Western Asia and to Europe. 

The settlements of Qakas which affected the 
history of India at this period are two in number. 
One of these occupied the country of the Jaxartes 
to the north of Bactria and Sogdiana, and had for 
ages past been regarded as a great danger to Persian 
and Hellenic civilization in Central Asia; while 
the other inhabited the province of Drangiana, 
which lay betweea Persia and India, and which 
subsequently bore the name of Qakasthana, ^ the 
abode of the Qakas ' (the later Sijistan and the 
modern Seistan). It is probable that both of these 
bodies of Qakas were stirred into activity in the 
middle of the second century B.C. by the same 
cause — the impact of further swarms of nomads 
who are known as the Yueh-chi. The result of 
this impact was two-fold. On the one hand, the 
Hellenic kingdom of Bactria was submerged in a 
flood of barbarian invasion, and, on the other, the 
Parthian kings were occupied during two reigns 
(Phraates II, 138-128 B.C., and Artabanus II (1), 
128-123 B.C.) in endeavours to stem the tide 
which had extended to Seistan, and were only 



138 ANCIENT INDIA 

completely successful in the following reign 
(Mithradates II the Great, 123-88 B.C.). The 
effect of the Qaka invasion of the Parthian 
kingdom was thus to increase the power of a 
Qaka settlement which was already established in 
the Parthian province of Seistan, and the result of 
the struggles between Qakas and Parthians in this 
region was the creation of a kingdom, probably 
more or less dependent on the kingdom of Parthia, 
in which the two peoples were associated. 

The third class of foreign invaders, who are, in 
Indian Hterature and inscriptions, called Pahlavas, 
were Parthians, the two names being etymologically 
identical. It is clear, however, that the Pahlavas 
who invaded India did not belong to the main 
stock which was represented by the rulers of the 
Parthian empire, but rather to the subordinate 
branch which was established in its eastern pro- 
vinces, Drangiana (Seistan), Arachosia (Kanda- 
har) and Gedrosia (Northern Baluchistan). The 
history of this subordinate kingdom is obscure. 
Almost our only evidence for its existence is 
suppUed by coins ; but these give us names of 
rulers which are undoubtedly Parthian in character, 
and the area over which the coins are found affords 
some indication of the extent of territory which 
these princes governed. They may have been 
originally satraps of the Parthian monarchs ; but 



PARTHIAN & SCYTHIAN INVADERS 139 

the title ' King of Kings ' which, in imitation of 
their former over-lords, they bear on their coins, 
shows that they had asserted their independence. 
The first of these Pahlavas to appear on the coins 
has the familiar Parthian name Vonones ; and we 
may, therefore, conveniently call the line to which 
he belongs ' the family of Vonones.' 

With this line of Pahlava princes the (Jaka 
invaders of India are intimately connected. Like 
them, and unlike the Gr^eco-Indian princes, they 
bear the title 'King of Kings.' The history of 
this title is interesting. It denoted originally the 
supreme lord who claimed the allegiance of a 
number of subordinate kings. It was the ancient 
title of the Persian monarchs, and as such it 
appears in the inscriptions of Darius in the form 
Kshdyathiydndm Kshdyathiya. In the Parthian 
monarchy it seems to occur first on coins of 
Mithradates II (123-88 B.C.), though some 
numismatists prefer to attribute the coins in 
question to Mithradates I (171- 138 B.C.). It was 
introduced into India by the Qaka and Pahlava 
invaders, and continued in use by their successors, 
the Kushanas ; and in the form Shdhan-shdh it 
remains the title of the Shahs of Persia even to 
the present day. 

There can be no doubt, then, that the 
distinctive title ' King of Kings ' connects the 



I40 ANCIENT INDIA 

Indian (Jakas with the Pahlavas and both with 
Parthia ; and this connexion is most naturally- 
explained on the theory that these Qakas came 
into India from Seistan through Kandahar, over 
the Bolan Pass, through Baluchistan into Sind and 
so up the valley of the Indus. This would 
explain the fact that the coins of Maues, the 
earliest known of these Qaka princes, are found in 
the Punjab only and not in the Kabul Valley, 
which still continued to be held by the Greek 
princes of the family of Eucratides. Access into 
the Kabul Valley from Bactria over the passes of 
the Hindu Kush was thus, at this period, barred. 

The progress which the Qaka conquests made 
at the expense of both the chief lines of Greek 
rulers is illustrated by the coins. Maues strikes 
coins which are directly imitated from those of 
Demetrius ; the Qaka satrap Liaka Kusulaka at 
Taxila imitates the coins of Eucratides, and 
another satrap, Ranjubula, at Muttra the coins 
struck by Strato I and II reigning conjointly. 
Everywhere, indeed, the Qaka invaders seem to 
have retained the form of coinage used by the 
Greek princes whom they dispossessed — a coinage 
distinguished by a Greek legend on the obverse 
and a Prakrit translation in Kharoshthi characters 
on the reverse — and it is probable that they only 
issued coins in those districts where they found 



PARTHIAN & SCYTHIAN INVADERS 141 

a currency already in existence. So far as is 
known, none of their coinages is original. All 
without exception are imitated from Greek or 
Hindu models. 

The Qakas continued in North-Western India 
the system of government by satraps which was 
firmly established there during the long period of 
Persian rule. This system was, as we have seen, 
followed by Alexander the Great, and there is no 
reason to suppose that it had been interrupted 
either under the Maurya empire or under the rule 
of the later Greek princes. 

Of the history of these Qaka satrapies inscrip- 
tions and coins give us a few details. 

An inscription affords the bare mention of a 
satrap of Kapi9a, the capital of Gandhara, a 
district which, as we know from coins, had passed 
from the family of Euthydemus (Apollodotus) 
into the power of Eucratides. 

There is a copper-plate inscription of a satrap of 
Taxila named Patika which records the deposit of 
relics of the Buddha and a donation made in the 
78 th year of some era not specified and during 
the reign of the Great King Moga, who is without 
doubt to be identified with Maues, since Moga is 
merely a dialectical variant of Moa^ the Indian 
equivalent of the name Maues found on the coins. 
The era in which the inscription is dated cannot at 



142 ANCIENT INDIA 

present be determined. The most plausible con- 
jecture is that it may be of Parthian origin ; and if 
it could be supposed to start from the beginning 
of the reign of Mithradates I (171 B.C.), the 
monarch who raised Parthia from a comparatively- 
small state to a great empire, which extended 
from the Euphrates to Bactria and the borders of 
India, the result as applied to this inscription 
(171—78=93 B.C.), would give a date which is 
fairly probable on other considerations. But it 
must be admitted that there is no evidence of the 
existence of such an era. The satrap Patika was 
the son of Liaka Kusulaka, who struck coins 
imitated from those of Eucratides. It would 
seem, then, that Taxila, like Kapiga (Gandhara), 
was taken by the Qakas from the family of 
Eucratides, while the Kabul Valley remained in its 
possession. 

Of the Qaka satraps of Mathura (Muttra) we 
possess a most valuable monument, which was 
discovered and first published by a distinguished 
Indian scholar. Pandit Bhagvanlal Indraji, who 
bequeathed it together with his valuable collection 
of ancient Indian coins to the British Museum. 
It is in the form of a large lion carved in red 
sandstone and intended to be the capital of a 
pillar. The workmanship shows undoubted 
Persian influence. The surface is completely 



PLATE IV. 




PARTHIAN & SCYTHIAN INVADERS 143 

covered with inscriptions in Kharoshthi char- 
acters, which give the genealogy of the satrapal 
family ruling at Muttra and also mention members 
of other satrapal houses in other provinces of 
North-Western India. These inscriptions show 
that the satraps of Muttra, like those of Kapi9a 
and Taxila, were Buddhists. The reigning 
satrap, or rather 'great satrap,' Rajula (whose 
name appears also as Raj uvula or Ranjubula) also 
struck coins, some of which are imitated from the 
currency of certain Greek princes of the house of 
Euthydemus — the Stratos — while others are copied 
from the coins of a line of Hindu princes who 
ruled at Muttra. We know, therefore, that in 
this district Qaka rule superseded that of both 
Greek and Hindu princes. 

Evidence of the existence of a Qaka power in 
Central India and of its defeat by a Hindu king 
is supplied by a Jain work called the Kdlikdchdrya- 
kathd or 'story of Kalikacharya.' From it we 
learn that the Qakas, who in Malwa were patrons 
of the Jain religion, were subdued by a king 
named Vikramaditya who reigned at Ujjain, and 
who established the era, beginning in 58 B.C., 
which still bears his name. The name of the king 
may, no doubt, be legendary ; or possibly, while 
the name itself has been lost, one of the king's titles, 
' the sun of valour,' has survived ; but that this 



144 ANCIENT INDIA 

era was really first used in Malwa is probable on 
other grounds. At a later date (405 a.d.) it is 
certainly described as ' the traditional reckoning of 
the Malava tribe.' The story goes on to say that 
this era continued in use for 135 years, when 
it was superseded by one which was founded by 
another Qaka conqueror. This second era is 
undoubtedly that which begins in 78 a.d., and 
it is still called the (^aka era. It is probable 
further that, soon after the date of its founda- 
tion, the Kushana empire extended to Malwa, 
and that its conquest was effected by the Pahlava 
and Qaka satraps of the Kushana emperor, 
Kanishka (see p. 147). 

It has been already observed that there is 
evidence of an intimate connexion between Pah- 
lavas and (Jakas, i.e. between 'the family of 
Vonones ' and ' the family of Maues.' This con- 
nexion appears to be proclaimed by certain coins 
on which Spalirises, ' the brother of the king ' 
(i.e. presumably of Vonones) is definitely associ- 
ated with Azes, who was almost certainly the 
successor of Maues. Such evidence as there is 
would seem to indicate that these two lines con- 
tinued to rule over adjacent provinces — the family 
of Vonones in Seistan, Kandahar, and North Balu- 
chistan, and the family of Maues in the West 
Punjab and Sind — until, probably towards the end 



PARTHIAN & SCYTHIAN INVADERS 145 

of the first quarter of the first century a.d., the 
two kingdoms were united under the sway of the 
Pahlava Gondopharnes, as to the Parthian character 
of whose name there can be no possible doubt. 
The evidence is almost entirely numismatic, and 
its bearings may be summarized as follows. 
The numerous varieties of the coinage of this 
monarch, copied as they are from so many pre- 
vious issues, show that he ruled over a very exten- 
sive dominion ; and the fact that these varieties 
are imitated from the currencies both of the family 
of Vonones and the family of Maues, leads us to 
the conclusion that he ruled over both the earlier 
kingdoms of the Pahlavas and of the Qakas. 

The fame of King Gondopharnes (or Gondo- 
pherres, as the name appears in the Greek coin- 
legends) spread even to the West, and he is known 
in the legends of the early Christian Church as the 
king to whose country St Thomas was sent as the 
apostle of the 'Parthians,' or, according to other 
authorities, of the ' Indians,' i.e. the people of the 
Indus country. The story of the mission of St 
Thomas and of the king's conversion to the Chris- 
tian faith is told in the apocryphal Acts of St 
no??ias^ of which there are extant versions in 
Syriac, Greek, and Latin, the earliest of these, the 
Syriac, belonging probably to the third century 
A.D. Doubtless there must be a great deal in 



146 ANCIENT INDIA 

this story which can only be regarded as pure 
legend, but it is reasonable to suppose that it may 
have some basis in fact. 

The names of several successors of Gondo- 
pharnes are known from their coins ; but these 
coins show that they ruled over a greatly diminished 
realm. Already at this period — the early part of 
the first century a.d. — the Kushana power, which 
had grown up in Bactria, had begun to absorb the 
various states of North-Western India, and to weld 
together Greeks, Qakas, Pahlavas, and Hindus 
into one great empire. 

The first step in the creation of this Indian 
empire was the conquest of the last remaining 
stronghold of Greek rule in the Kabul Valley. 
The coins show clearly the process by which this 
region, probably in the last quarter of the first 
century B.C., passed from Hermans, the last ruling 
member of the line of Eucratides, to his conqueror, 
the Kushana Kujula Kadphises. The conquest of 
'India,' the country of the Indus, was the work 
of his successor, who is known from his coins 
as Wima Kadphises, and after him the Kushana 
empire reached its culminating point in the reign 
of Kanishka. 

The question of the date of Kanishka is still 
the subject of keen controversy ; but it will pro- 
bably be settled within a short time by the exca- 



PARTHIAN & SCYTHIAN INVADERS 147 

vations which are now being made by the Archseo- 
logical Survey of India on the ancient site of 
Taxila, one of his capitals. 

In the meantime, until absolute certainty can be 
attained, a probable view appears to be that he 
was the founder of the Qaka era, the initial year 
of which is 78 a.d., and that the era obtained its 
name from the fact that it became most widely 
known in India as that which was used for more 
than three centuries by the Qaka kings of Surashtra 
(Gujarat and Kathiawar) who were originally 
satraps and feudatories of the Kushanas. 

With the establishment of the Kushana Empire 
we must bring our survey of ^ Ancient India ' to a 
close. The history of the remaining ten centuries 
which elapsed before the Muhammadan period 
may, perhaps, be more fittingly included under the 
heading 'Medieval India.' In Medieval, as in 
Ancient, India we may see the rise and fall of 
empires, partly of foreign and partly of native 
origin, some of them the result of invasions through 
the ' Gates of India ' on the north or north-west, 
others the outcome of the struggle for supremacy 
between the nationalities of the continent itself. 



NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE GIRNAR ROCK IN 1869 
(Plate I, Frontispiece, and Plate V a, facing p. 150) 

GiRNAR, the Sanskrit G'tr'tnagara, the * Hill City,' was in 
ancient times the name of Junagadh in Kathiawar. It is now 
applied to the sacred mountain on the east of the city. At the 
foot of this mountain stands a rock which is without question 
one of the most interesting and valuable of all historical 
monuments. It is about twelve feet in height and seventy-five 
feet in circumference at the base ; and it has engraved on its 
surface records of three kings belonging to three different 
dynasties which have ruled over Western India: — (i) Afoka, 
the Maurya Emperor, c. 250 b.c. ; (2) Rudradaman, the 
Mahakshatrapa or * Great Satrap ' of Surashtra and Malava 
(inscription dated in the year 72 of what was called at a later 
date the Caka era =150 a.d.) ; and (3) Skandagupta, the 
Gupta Emperor (inscription bearing dates in the years 136, 
137, and 138 of the Gupta era beginning in 319 a.d. = 455, 
456, and 457 A.D.). 

The illustration is from a photograph taken by Dr James 
Burgess in 1869. Since that date the rock has been pro- 
tected from further injury by a roof. The fourteen edicts 
of A^oka are engraved on the north-east face of the rock and 
cover a space of about 100 square feet. The inscription of 
Rudradaman occupies the top, and the inscription of Skanda- 
gupta the west face. 

The edicts of A^oka have already been described [v. pp. 
105-8). The subjoined reproduction of an impression of the 
second edict will serve to illustrate the beautiful Brahml writing 
of the period — the letters in the original are about two inches 

149 



I50 ANCIENT INDIA 

in height — and the translation which is appended will show the 
historical importance of these inscriptions. 

Transliteration 
(i) Savrata vijitamhi devanam priyasa priyadasino raiio 

(2) evam api prachamtesu yatha Choda Pada Satiyaputo 
Keralaputo a Tainba- 

(3) parnni Amtiyako Yonaraja ye vapi tasa Ariitiyakasa 
samipain 

(4) rajano savrata deranam priyasa priyadasino rano dve 
chikichha kata 

(5) manusa-chikichha cha pasu-chiklchha cha osudhani cha 
yani manusopagani cha 

(6) paso[^pa]]gani cha yata yata nasti savrata harapitani cha 
ropapitani cha 

(7) mulani cha phalani cha yata yata nasti savrata harapitani 
cha ropapitani cha 

(8) pamthesu kupa cha khanapita vrachha cha ropapita 
paribhogSya pasumanusanam. 

Translation 
* Everywhere in the realm of his Gracious Majesty, the King, 
the Beloved of the Gods, and likewise also in the border lands, 
such as (the countries of) the Cholas, the Pandyas, Satiyaputra, 
Keralaputra, as far as Ceylon, Antiochus the Greek king, or 
the kings in the neighbourhood of the said Antiochus, every- 
where has his Gracious Majesty, the King, the Beloved of the 
Gods, provided remedies of two kinds, remedies for men and 
remedies for animals ; and herbs, both such as are serviceable 
to men and serviceable to animals, wheresoever there were none, 
has he everywhere caused to be procured and planted, roots 
also and fruits, wheresoever there were none, has he everywhere 
caused to be procured and planted, and on the highways has he 
caused wells to be dug and trees to be planted for the enjoyment 
of animals and men.' 



1 1 . .'^ 1 !•. V , 



:jff^^: •ftC-*^^- 1' <f-Pi^l?* <?-£■<) >^^ -su,/^ (jAJ^I 



BRAHMI INSCRIPTION ON THE GIRNAR ROCK. 



^^Sce page 150. 




KHAROSHTHI INSCRIPTION ON THE KASE OF THE 

MATMURA LION-CAPITAL, See page 158. 



NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 151 

COINS OF ANCIENT INDIA 
(Plate II, facing p. i8) 

1. Punch-marked Coin 

Obv. A number of symbols. 

Rev. Traces of symbols. Silver. 

This represents the primitive form of Indian coinage, which 
is little more than a currency of square or oblong pieces cut out 
of a flat plate of silver. The symbols punched on to the coin 
on the obverse are supposed to be the private marks of the money- 
changers, while those on the reverse^ which are almost invariably 
fewer in number and of a somewhat different character, may 
possibly denote the locality in which the coins were issued. 

2. Ancient Cast Coin 

Obv. Ram Dhamapalasa=^ {Qo\v\) of King Dharmapala,' 
in very ancient Brahml characters written from right to left. 
Rev. Blank. Bronze. 

Coins of this class are found at the village of Eran in the 
Saugor District of the Central Provinces. This coin has been 
quoted in support of the view that the Brahmi alphabet was 
originally written from right to left like Kharoshthi [v, 

p. 18). 

3. Guild Token 

Obv. Steel-yard ; above, Dujaka or Dojaka^ in Kharoshthi 
characters. 

Rev. in incuse. Negama = * Merchants * in Brahml 
characters. " Bronze. 

The use of these tokens is uncertain, as also is the meaning 
of the legend on the Obverse. 



152 ANCIENT INDIA 

4. Pantaleon 

Obn). in incuse. Maneless lion to right; Greek legend, 
Basileos Pantaleontos =* [Coin) of King Pantaleon/ 

Rev. An Indian dancing girl ; Brahml legend. Raji[ne2 
Pa7ntale'vasa.^ Bronze. 

Pantaleon was one of the earliest Greek kings of Bactria to 
reign also in India. The square shape of this coin shows the 
influence of the old Indian currency of the district in which it 
was struck. 

5. Ancient Struck Coin : Single Die 

Obv, A Chaitya, or Buddhist shrine ; to left, Vatasvaka in 
Brahmi characters ; to right, a standing figure worshipping ; 
beneath him, the symbol called nandi-pada, * the footprint of 
Nandi' (fiva's bull). 

Rev. Blank. Bronze, 

It has been suggested that the legend Vatasvaka may denote 
the * Fig-tree ' [vata) branch of the A^vakas, a people of 
North-Western India who may perhaps be the Assakenoi of 
Alexander's historians. The three early forms of Indian 
coinage — punch-marked, cast, and struck on one side only — 
are illustrated by Nos. i, 2, and 5 respectively. 

6. SOPHYTES 

Obv. Helmeted head of king to right. 

Rev. Cock to right ; above, on left, a caduceus (the emblem 
of the Greek god Hermes) ; Greek legend, Sdphutou = ^ (Com) 
of Sophy tes.' Silver, 

The coin is purely Greek in style. At the time of 
Alexander's invasion, Sophytes, whose name in its Greek form 

1 In the case of all the bilingual coins represented in this plate, the 
Indian leo;end is an exact translation of the Greek. 



NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 153 

is supposed to represent the Sanskrit Saubhuti, was ruling over 
a kingdom in the Punjab. He entertained Alexander with the 
spectacle of a fight in which four of his dogs were matched 
against a lion. As his sporting propensities were so strong, it 
is possible that the cock on his coins may be a fighting cock. 
That sport was certainly popular in Ancient India. 

7. ANTlALCmAS 

Ohv. Bust of king to right ; Greek legend, Basheos 
nik'ephorou \ Antialkidou — ^ {^Co'm) of King Antialcidas, the 
Victorious.' 

Rev. Zeus seated on a throne and holding in his right hand 
a figure of Nike (the goddess of victory) ; on the left, the 
forepart of an elephant with trunk upraised ; Kharoshthi legend, 
Maharajasa jayadharasa | ^mtiaUkitasa. Silver. 

The type of Zeus enthroned is frequently found on the coins 
of the Greek princes of the house of Eucratides to which 
Antialcidas belonged. For the Indian inscription in which he 
is mentioned, v. p. 134. 

8. Menander 

Obv. Bust of king thrusting a spear to left ; Greek legend, 
Basileos soteros | Menandrou = '• (Coin) of King Menander, the 
Saviour.' 

Rev. Athene hurling a thunder-bolt to right ; Kharoshthi 
legend, Maharajasa tratarasa | Menajudrasa. Silver. 

For Menander, v. p. 129. He belonged to the family of 
Euthydemus, of which the figure of Athene is the most 
characteristic coin-type. 

9. Demetrius 
Obv. Head of elephant to right. 

Rev. Caduceus ; Greek legend, Basileos DemPtrieu, '(Coin) 
of King Demetrius.' Bronze, 



154 ANCIENT INDIA 

lo. Maues 

Obv. Head of elephant to right. 

Rev. Caduceus; Greek legend, Basileos Mauou, * (Coin) of 
King Maues.' Bronze, 

These coins, the second of which is an exact imitation of the 
first, show that the rule of the district in which they circulated 
passed from the Greeks of the house of Euthydemus to the 
Cakas (^y. p. 140). 

II. EUCRATIDES 

Obv. Helmeted bust of king to right. 

Rev. The caps of the Dioscuri (Castor and Pollux) sur- 
mounted by stars j two palms ; below, a monogram ; Greek 
egend, Basileos Eukratidou = * (Coin) of King Eucratides.' 

Silver. 

12. LlAKA KUSULAKA 

Obv, Helmeted bust to right. 

Rev. The caps of the Dioscuri ; two palms ; below, a mono- 
gram ; Legend in Greek characters, [_Li'^ako \_K~\ozouto. 

Silver. 

Similarly these coins show the transition of the district to 
which they belong from the rule of the house of Eucratides to 
the Cakas. Liaka Kusulaka was a satrap and the father of Patika 
whose inscription at Taksha^ila was engraved in the reign of the 
Great King Moga (the Maues or Moa of the coins) and is 
dated in the seventy-eighth year of an era which has not yet been 
determined. (1;. p. 141), 

13. Dharaghosha, King of Audumbara 

Obv. Standing figure (probably of Vifvamitra, the rishi of the 
third book of the Rig-veda) ; Kharoshthi legends : (i) Around, 



NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 155 

Mahadevasa rana Dharaghoshasa | Odumbarisa — *' {Qoin) of the 
Great Lord, King Dharaghosha j Prince of Audumbara ' ; (2) 
across, Vigvamitra. 

Rev. Trident battle-axe ; Tree within railing ; BrahmT legend 
(identical with the Kharoshthi legend ( i ) on the Obverse). 

Silver. 

Audambara, or the country of the Udnmbaras, was situated 
in that region of the Punjab in which the two alphabets of 
Ancient India, Brahmi and Kharoshthi^ were used concurrently. 
The coins are found in the neighbourhood of Pathankot in the 
Gurdaspur District. They show the influence of the Greek 
type of coinage. In fabric and style they somewhat resemble 
the coins of Apollodotus, a prince of the [house of Euthydemus, 
and they are sometimes found in association with them. Their 
date would seem to be about 100 b.c. 



156 ANCIENT INDIA 

THE BESNAGAR COLUMN 
(Plate III, facing p. 134, and Plate VI, facing p. 157) 

This monument is best described in the words of Dr J. H. 
Marshall, CLE., the Director General of Archseology in 
India. He says {^Journal of the Royal Astatic Society, 1909* 
p. 1053) :— 

" When examining the ancient site of Besnagar, near Bhilsa, 
in the extreme south of the Gwalior State, my attention was 
drawn to a stone column standing near a large mound, a little to 
the north-east of the main site, and separated from it by a 
branch of the Betwa river. This column had been noticed by 
Sir A. Cunningham as far back as 1877, and a description of it 
(though not a wholly accurate one) appeared in his Report for 
that year. The shaft of the column is a monolith, octagonal at 
the base, sixteen-sided in the middle, and thirty-two-sided 
above, with a garland dividing the upper and middle portions ; 
the capital is of the Persepolitan bell-shaped type, with a 
massive abacus surmounting it and the whole is crowned with a 
palm-leaf ornament of strangely unfamiliar design, which I 
strongly suspect did not originally belong to it. In 1877 this 
column was thickly encrusted from top to bottom, as it still is, 
with vermilion paint smeared on it by pilgrims, who generation 
after generation have come to worship at the spot." 

The subsequent removal of the paint revealed the inscription, 
the historical importance of which has been already described 
(p. 134). A specimen of the coinage of the Graeco-Indian 
king, Antialcidas, is shown in Plate II, No. 7 (facing p. 18). 
The inscription shows that the figure on the top of the column, 
if original, should represent Garuda, who has the form of a bird 
and is supposed to carry the god Vishnu. There is also a 
smaller inscription of two lines, apparently in verse. The text 
and translation of the two inscriptions here given are based on 



PLATE VI. 






^f"y''0^'.\*' 










BRAHMI INSCRIPTIONS ON THE BESNAGAR COLUMN. 

[Seepage 157. 



NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS 157 

the readings and interpretations proposed by Dr Bloch, Dr Fleet, 
Prof. Barnett, and Prof. Venis, in various articles which will be 
found in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for the years 
1909 and 1910. 

Transliteration 



(i) Devadevasa Va^sude^vasa Garudadhvaje ayarp 

(2) karite 'i\ji~\ Heliodorena bhaga- 

(3) vatena Diyasa putrena TakhasiJakena 

(4) Yona-dutena agatena maharajasa 

(5) Arntalikitasa upa[m]ta sakasam rano 

(6) Kasiputl^r^asa Bhagabhadrasa tratarasa 

(7) vasena [^chatuj dasemna rajena vadhamanasa 



(i) Trini amuta-padani — [su] anuthitani 
(2) nayamti svaga dama caga apramada. 



Translation 



"This Garuda-column of Vasudeva (Vishnu) the god of 
gods, was erected here by Hehodorus, a worshipper of Vishnu, 
the son of Dion, and an inhabitant of Taxila, who came as 
Greek ambassador from the Great King Antialcidas to King 
Ka9rputra Bhagabhadra, the Saviour, then reigning prosperously 
in the fourteenth year of his kingship." 



" Three immortal precepts (footsteps) . . . when practised 
lead to heaven — self-restraint, charity, conscientiousness." 



158 ANCIENT INDIA 

THE MATHURA LION-CAPITAL 

(Plate IV, facing p. 142, and Plate V b, facing p. 150) 

This capital of hard red sandstone must originally have sur- 
mounted a pillar. It was discovered by the late Pandit 
Bhagvanlal Indraji at Muttra, where it was built into the steps 
of an altar devoted to the worship of Citala, or the goddess 
of small-pox. The Pandit was also the first to decipher the 
Kharoshthi inscriptions with which the capital is completely 
covered and to recognize their great historical value {v. p. 142). 
He bequeathed the capital to the British Museum, where it may 
now be seen in the Gallery of Religions. The illustration facing 
p. 150 represents the base of the capital where it was joined to 
the pillar. It contains the beginning of the chief inscription. 
The transliteration and translation are, with a few slight changes 
in the former, borrowed from the edition of Dr F. W. Thomas 
in the Epigraphia Jndica, vol. ix. p. 135. 

Transliteration 

( 1 ) Mahachhatravasa Rajulasa 

(2) agramahish(r)i-Ayasia- 

(3) Komusaa dhitra 

(4) Kharaostasa yuvarana 

(5) matra Nadasi-Akasa. . . 

Translation 

" By the Chief Queen of the Great Satrap Rajula, daughter 
of Ayasi-Komusa, mother of the Heir Apparent Kharaosta, 
Nandasi-Akasa (by name) " [associated with the other 
members of her family a relic of the Holy Sage, Buddha, 
was deposited in the stupa]. 



NOTES ON THE ANCIENT GEOGRAPHY 

OF INDIA 

(^See the map at the End) 

The names of Peoples and Countries are printed in capitals. 
In Ancient India they were identical, as they were in Ancient 
Britain in the time of Julius Csesar. The names of Mountains 
and Rivers are printed in ordinary type. 

Achiravati, v. Cakya. 

Akara, v. Malava. 

Amaravati, v. List of Cities, No. i (p. 172). 

Andhra, the name of a tribe of Southern India inhabiting 
the Telugu country between the rivers Krishna (Kistna) and 
Godavari which is often called Andhra-de9a, the 'Country of 
the Andhras.' They are mentioned in one of the later books 
of the Aitareya Brahmana (possibly c, 500 B.C.). They are 
described by Pliny [Hisioria Naturalis, vi. 21-23), who 
probably quotes from Megasthenes [c. 300 B.C.), as being, next 
to the Prasii, the most powerful of the nations of India. Their 
relations to the Maurya Empire are uncertain ; but the manner 
in which they are mentioned in the inscriptions of Afoka [c. 
250 B.C.) seems to indicate that they acknowledged its suzerainty 
while retaining a certain degree of independence. On the 
decline of the Maurya Empire their power greatly increased ; 
and early in the second century b.c. their dominions had ex- 
tended westwards across the Deccan to the District of Nasik 
in the Bombay Presidency. It is probable also that at this 

159 



i6o ANCIENT INDIA 

period they came into collision with the kingdom of Magadha, 
now under the Cuhgas. The dynasty under which the Andhras 
won this great empire bears the general name of ^atavahana and 
many of its kings are called ^atakarni. The dynastic list is 
given in the Puranas. Its total duration is usually stated to be 
456 or 460 years and the number of reigns thirty. If we 
suppose, therefore, that the dynasty began about 220 b.c, it 
would have ended about 240 a.d. ; and this is probably a fairly 
correct statement. At various intervals during this period we 
are enabled from inscriptions, coins, and literature to trace the 
history cdf the Andhras with some precision. In literature they 
are frequently associated with their northern neighbours, the 
Kalihgas, as also in the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela, 
the king of Kalinga, c. 150 B.C. But their most important 
historical monuments belong to the first half of the second 
century A.D. (f. 120-150 a.d.), the period during which they 
came into conflict in Western India with the Pahlava and (^aka 
satraps of the Kushana Empire. 

The decline of the Andhra Empire began about the end of 
the second century a.d., when the western and south-western 
provinces passed into the hands of another dynasty of ^atakarnis, 
the Chutu family, to whom the designation Andhra-bhrityas, or 
* servants of the Andhras,' is specially applied. About the 
middle of the third century a.d., the Chutu family was sup- 
planted by the Abhiras in the west and by the Kadambas in the 
south-west, while the Catavahana family, which had continued to 
hold Andhra-de9a in the east, was succeeded by a Rajput dynasty. 

For the chief centres of Andhra rule, v. List of Cities — No. i, 
Amaravati; No. 12, Pratishthana ; and No. 16, Vaijayanti, 
(pp. 172, 174, 175). 

Anga, the Districts of Monghyr and Bhagalpur in N. Bengal. 
Its capital was Champa, near the modern town of Bhagalpur on 
the Ganges. 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA i6i 

Aparanta, the * Western Border,' the ancient name of the 
Northern Konkan, the northern portion of the strip of country 
lying between the Western Ghats and the sea. Its capital was 
(^urparaka, the modern Sopara in the Thana District of Bombay. 

Aryavarta, the ' Land of the Aryans/ v. p. 50. 

Asiknl, the * Black River/ the Vedic name of the river which 
was afterwards called in Sanskrit the Chandrabhaga. It is the 
Acesines of the historians of Alexander and the modern Chenab. 
Hesychius of Alexandria, the author of a celebrated Greek 
lexicon (probably in the fifth century a.d.), says the name 
Chandrabhaga was changed by Alexander. In its Greek form, 
Sandrophagos^ it might be interpreted to mean the ' Devourer of 
Alexander.' He therefore preferred the older name Asiknl, 
the Greek form of which, Acesines, might be supposed to mean 
the « Healer.' 

Avanti, v. Malava. 

Ayodhya, "v. List of Cities, No. 2 (p. 172). 

Bhrigu-kaccha, v. List of Cities, No. 3 (p. 172). 

Brahmarshi-deca, the * Country of the Holy Sages,' v. 
p. 50. 

Brahmayarta, the * Holy Land,' x' p 51. 

Cakala, v. List of Cities, No. 4 (p 172). 

Cakya, one of the numerous Kshatriya clans living in the low- 
lands at the foot of the Himalayas in what is now known as the 
Nepalese Tarai. It is celebrated as the clan to which Buddha 
belonged. Its territory was bordered on the north by the 
mountains, on the east by the river Rohiiii, and on the west and 
south by the river Achiravati (Raptl). Its capital was Kapila- 
vastu, in the neighbourhood of which was Lumbini-vana, or the 
* Grove of Lumbini,' where Buddha was born [v. p. 67). 
L 



1 62 ANCIENT INDIA 

The Cakyas were an aristrocratic oligarchy owing some allegi- 
ance probably to the kingdom of Kosala. 

Champa, v. Anga. 

Chandrabhaga, v. Asiknl. 

Charmanvati, the river Chambal, the largest tributary of the 
Jumna. 

Chedi, the name of a people mentioned in the Rig-veda. In 
later times they occupied the northern portion of the Central 
Provinces. 

Chera, v. Kerala. 

Chola, a Tamil people of Southern India from whom the 
Coromandel Coast receives its name. (Coromandel = Sanskrit 
Chola-mandala, the * Province of the Cholas ' ) . They are 
mentioned in the inscriptions of A9oka {^c. 250 b.c.) among the 
independent peoples living beyond the limits of the Maurya 
Empire. They occur also in the Mahabharata. Other ancient 
literature (Tamil, Greek, and Latin) testifies to the sea-borne 
traffic which was carried on between the Coromandel Coast and 
Alexandria and thence to Europe. Evidence of the trade with 
Rome is afforded by the numerous Roman coins which have 
been discovered in various districts of Southern India. Among 
them has been found the gold piece which was struck by the 
Emperor Claudius (41-54 a.d. ) to commemorate the conquest 
of Britain. Further evidence of the trade between Southern 
India and the West is supplied by words. Om pepper comes to 
us from the Tamil pippali through the Greek peper'i. 

Cravasti, i>. List of Cities, No. 5 (p. 173). 

CuRASENA, the region of Muttra in the United Provinces. 

(^urparaka, 'v. Aparanta. 

Cutudri, the Vedic name for the Sutlej, called by the Greeks 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 163 

Zadadrus or Zaradrus. Like all the great rivers of the Punjab, 
the Sutlej has changed its course in historical times, and some 
of its deserted channels are still to be traced. At present it is 
a tributary of the Indus ; but in the time of Alexander the 
Great it was probably an independent river flowing into the 
Rann of Cutch. 

Dakshinapatha, the Deccan, the 'Southern Region' 
(Sanskrit dakshina, Prakrit dakkhina = ^ &0Mt\\^) as opposed to 
Uttarapatha, the * Northern Region/ 

Dhanyakataka, v. List of Cities, No. i. Amaravatl (p. 172). 
Drishadvatl, the * Stony River,' v. p. 51. 

Gandhara, n). p. 81. 

Ganga, the Ganges, the most celebrated of the sacred rivers 
of India. It is only mentioned once directly in the Rig-veda, 
and that in a late passage. This fact indicates that the Aryan 
settlers had not yet occupied the plain of the Ganges when the 
hymns of the Rig-veda were composed. 

Girinagara, v. p. 149. 

Girivraja, v. Magadha. 

Godavari, the river of Southern India which still bears the 
same name. 

Gomatl, the name in the Rig-veda of the present river 
Gumal, a tributary of the Indus. 

Hastinapur, v. List of Cities, No. 6. Indraprastha (p. 173). 

Himalaya, the ' Abode of Snow,' called in the Rig-veda 
Himavant, the ' Snowy Mountain,' and by the Greeks Imaus, 
Himaus, or Hemodus, all more or less successful attempts to 
reproduce in the Greek alphabet the Prakrit equivalents of the 
Vedic name. 

Iravati, v, Parushnl, 



1 64 ANCIENT INDIA 

Kaccha, the * Shore,' the country which still bears the same 
name, though it is now usually spelt Cutch. The word seems 
to be a Prakrit form of the Sanskrit kaksha, * a girdle.' 

Ka^i, the modern Benares, a small kingdom the possession 
of which was sometimes in dispute between its more power- 
ful neighbours Kosala (Oudh) and Videha (Tirhut) at the 
period when Buddha lived. It is usually associated with 
Kosala. 

Kalinga, the country lying along the east coast of India 
between the Mahanadi and the Godavari. Kalinga was 
conquered by A9oka {y. p. io6) ; but on the decline of the 
Maury a Empire it again became independent ('y. p. ii6), 

Kamarupa, the ancient name of Assam. 

Kampilya, v. Panchala. 

Kapilavastu, v. Cakya. 

Kau9ambr, v. Vatsa. 

KaverT, the Cauvery River of Southern India, the * Ganges 
of the South.' 

Kerala, also written Chera, an ancient kingdom of Southern 
India comprising the modern Malabar, Cochin, and Travancore. 
The name of its king appears as Keralaputra in the inscriptions 
of A9oka. 

Kongu-de^a, the Districts of Salem and Coimbatore in the 
Madras Presidency. 

Kosala, a kingdom lying to the east of Panchala and to the 

west of Videha. It is the modern Province of Oudh in the 

United Provinces. Its chief cities were Ayodhya or Saketa 
and Cravasti. 

Krishna, the * Black River,' the modern Kistna. 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 165 

Krivi, v. Panchala. 

Krumu, the name in the Rig-veda for the modern river 
Kurram, a western tributary of the Indus. 

Kubha, the name in the Rig-veda for the Kabul River. 

KuRu, the name of the most important people of India in the 
time of the Brahmanas. Kuru-kshetra, or the * Field of the 
Kurus ' (v. p. 47) may be described as the Eastern half of the 
State of Patiala and the Delhi division of the Punjab. The 
holy land of Brahmavarta lay within its border on the north- 
west, and its eastern limit was formed by the River Jumna. 
But the territories occupied by the Kurus extended to the east 
far beyond the limits of Kurukshetra. Their ancient capital 
Hastinapura was situated on the Ganges in the Meerut District 
of the United Provinces. They must, therefore, have occupied 
the northern portion of the doab, or the region between the 
Jumna and the Ganges, having as their neighbours on the east 
the North Panchalas, and on the south the South Panchalas, who 
held the rest of the doab as far as the land of the Vatsas, the 
corner where the two rivers meet at Prayaga (Allahabad). 
The Kurus and Panchalas are constantly associated in early 
Sanskrit literature and the name Kuru-Panchala is often used to 
denote their united countries. 

For the later and more celebrated capital of the Kurus, v. 
List of Cities, No. 6, Indraprastha (p. 173). 

Lanka sometimes denotes Ceylon, and sometimes the city in 
the island which was the capital of the demon Ravana, whose 
abduction of Sita and subsequent destruction by Rama form part 
of the story of the Ramayana. 

LiccHAVi, v. Vaifalr. 

Madhya-de§a, the * Middle Country,' -v. p. 50. 

Magadha, Southern Bihar, the Districts of Gay«l and Patoa 



1 66 ANCIENT INDIA 

in Bengal, a kingdom of the greatest political importance in the 
history of Ancient and Medieval India. The rise of the 
Maurya Empire of Magadha is described in Chapter VII. 
(p. 99). Once again in later history did Magadha become the 
centre of a great empire, under the Gupta Dynasty, the establish- 
ment of which is marked by its era which begins in the year 
3 1 9 A.D. The ancient capital of Magadha was Girivraja or 
Rajagriha, the site of which is marked by ruins at the village of 
Rajgir in the Patna District. The later capital was Pataliputra, 
for which v. List of Cities, No. 11 (p. 174). 

MahanadT, the * Great River,' which still retains its name. 
It flows through the Orissa Division of Bengal and was the 
northern limit of the ancient kingdom of Kalifiga. 

Maharashtra, the Maratha Country, the Districts of Nasik, 
Poona, Satara, and the Kolhapur State in the Bombay 
Presidency. The inhabitants of this region are called Rathikas 
(Sanskrit Rashtrika) in the inscriptions of Afoka and are 
associated with the Pitenikas or people of Paithan. 

Malava. (i) Malwa in Central India. It was sometimes 
divided into two kingdoms : Avanti or W. Malava with its 
capital Ujjayini (Ujjain), and Akara or E. Malava with its 
capital Vidifa (Bhilsa). 

(2) (Also spelt Malaya, or Malaya) a people living in the 
Punjab and known from Sanskrit literature. They are the Malli 
of the historians of Alexander the Great. 

The name was probably that of a tribe which had settlements 
in different parts of India. 

Maru, the Thar or Great Indian Desert of Rajputana. 

Mathura, v. List of Cities, No. 9 (p. 174). 

Matsya, the name of a people mentioned in the Rig-veda. 
In the period of the Mahabharata they lived to the south of the 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 167 

Kurus and to the west of the Curasenas. Their country is 
the modern State of Alwar in Rajputana and some adjacent 
districts. 

Mithila, V. List of Cities, No. lo (p. 174) 

Narmada, the modern river Narbada. 

NiSHADHA, an ancient kingdom on the south of the Vindhya 
Mountains. It lay to the south of Malava and to the north- 
west of Vidarbha. It is best known as the realm of King Nala, 
in the * Story of Nala,' an episode of the Mahabharata. 

Pallava, a people of Southern India having as their capital 
Kanchi (Conjeeveram). 

PAffcHALA, a people who appear to be identical with the 
Krivis mentioned in the Rig-veda. The name would suggest 
that they were a confederation of five tribes (Sanskrit />a/7r^^, 
*five'). In history they are sometimes divided into two 
kingdoms — South Paiichala, the country between the Jumna 
and Ganges to the east and south-east of the Kurus and 
Curasenas, and North Panchala, districts of the United 
Provinces lying east of the Ganges and north-west of the 
Province of Oudh. The capital of South Panchala was 
Kampilya, now represented by ruins at the village of Kampil in 
the Farrukhabad District. It appears in the Mahabharata as 
the capital of King Drupada, the father of Krishna or Draupadl, 
who became the wife of the five sons of Pandu. The capital 
of North Panchala was Ahicchatra, also mentioned in the 
Mahabharata and now a ruined site still bearing the same name 
near the village of Ramnagar in the Bareilly District. 

The Panchalas are often associated with the Kurus : v. 
KuRu. 

Pandya, an ancient people occupying the modern Districts of 
Madura and Tinnevelly in the extreme south of India. They 



1 68 ANCIENT INDIA 

are mentioned by Greek and Latin authors and also by the 
Emperor A^oka in his edicts. 

Paropanisus, sometimes written Paropamisus, the Greek 
name for the Hindu Kush which was also sometimes called the 
Indian Caucasus. It is the Greek form of Paruparesanna, the 
name which the people of this region bear in the Babylonian 
and Susian versions of the inscription of Darius at Behistun 
{v. p. 84). 

Parushni, the name in the Rig-veda of the river which is 
called in later Sanskrit Iravati, the modern Ravi. It is the 
Hydraotes of the Greeks. It is celebrated in the Rig-veda in 
connexion with the victory of Sudas over the ten kings. 

Pataliputra, -v. List of Cities, No. 11 (p. 174). 

Pratishthana, v. List of Cities, No. 12 (p. 174). 

Prayaga, v. List of Cities, No. 13 (p. T75). 

Rajagriha, v. Magadha. 

Rohini, "v. Cakya. 

Sadaolra, v. Videha. 

Samatata, the * Even Shore,' the ancient name of the 
Ganges delta. 

Sarasvati, the * River of Lakes,' "w. p. 51. 

Sindhu, the ancient name of the Indus, the river from which 
India derives its name (1?. p. 24). 

Sindhu- SauvTra, the lower valley of the Indus, approxi- 
mately the modern Province of Sind. The two parts of the 
compound are often used separately as names having much the 
same meaning. 

Sipra, 1;. List of Cities, No. 15. Ujjayinl (p. 175). 
SuRASHTRA, the * Good Kingdom,' Kathiawar and a part of 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 169 

Gujarat in Western India. The name survives in the modern 
name Surat. 

Suvastu, the * River of Good Dwellings,' the name in the 
Rig-veda for the Swat, a tributary of the Kabul River. 

Takshafiia, v. List of Cities, No. 14 (p. I75)« 

Tamraparni". (i) the Sanskrit name of a town in Ceylon, 
sometimes used in a wider sense to denote the whole island. 
In this latter sense it occurs in its Pali form Tambapanni in 
Buddhist literature and in the inscriptions of Afoka. It is 
known to Greek and Latin writers as Taprobane. (2) Tam- 
braparni, a river in the Tinnevclly Dist. of Madras. 

TapT, the Sanskrit name of the modern river Tapti in 
Western India. 

Ujjayini, v. List of Cities, No. 15 (p. 175). 

Vai9alr, the modern Basarh in the Hajlpur subdivision which 
occupies the south-western corner of the Muzaffarpur District 
of Bengal. The ancient site is marked by a large mound of 
ruins and by a magnificent uninscribed pillar of Afoka which 
is surmounted by the figure of a lion. It is described by the 
Chinese Buddhist pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang, who visited the spot 
early in the seventh century a.d. In the sixth century B.C. 
Vai9alT was the seat of a small but powerful aristocratic oligarchy 
of nobles belonging to the Licchavi clan which seems to have 
been a branch of the Vriji tribe. The Vrijis formed a con- 
federacy, and the country of the Vrijis seems to have included 
not only Vai9alr but also the larger adjoining realm of Videha. 
It was at Kundapura, the modern Basukund, a suburb of Vai9alr, 
that Vardhamana Jnataputra, the founder of Jainism, was born. 
Vai9alr was famous also in the annals of Buddhism ; and it was 
here that the Second Buddhist Council was held a hundred 
years after Buddha's death for the purpose of correcting certain 



lyo ANCIENT INDIA 

abuses which had grown up in the doctrine and practices of the 
religious community. Vai^ all, situated near the opposite bank of 
the Ganges, was a standing menace to PataHputra and stood in 
the way of the expansion of the kingdom of Magadha. It was 
accordingly reduced to submission by Ajata^atru, the king of 
Magadha, shortly after Buddha's death. The removal of this 
obstacle cleared the way for the extension of the political 
influence of Magadha not only over Videha (Tirhut) but also 
over Kosala (Oudh), and is therefore an important fact in the 
growth of the empire of Magadha. 

Vaijayanti, v. List of Cities, No. i6 (p. 175). 

Vanga, the old form of the modern name Bengal. It 
denoted the western and central districts of the present province, 
viz. Murshidabad, Birbhum, Burdwan, and Nadia. 

Vatsa, the region of Prayaga («i>. List of Cities, No. 13), or 
Allahabad in the United Provinces. Its capital was Kaufambi 
which has been identified, though not with absolute certainty, 
with Kosam, the name borne by two adjacent villages (Kosam 
Inam and Kosam Khiraj) in the Allahabad District. 

Vidarbha, the modern Berar, now attached to the Central 
Provinces. It was the kingdom of Bhima, the father of 
Damayanti, the heroine of the * Story of Nala.' The tradition 
of a war between Magadha and Vidarbha is preserved in 
Kalidasa's historical drama Malavikagn'tmitra (r. 400 a.d). 
Kalidasa, like Shakespeare, was probably careless about details 
of ancient history or geography ; and some of the information 
which we derive from the Malavikdgnimitra is no doubt inexact. 
If we may correct and supplement this information from other 
sources, we may suppose that early in the second century B.C., 
when the ^unga king Pushyamitra was reigning over 
Magadha with his son Agnimitra as viceroy of the Province 
of Malava, there was a war between Malava and Vidarbha, 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 171 

which was at that period probably a province of the Andhra 
Empire. 

ViDEHA, Tirhut or Northern Bihar. It probably comprised 
the districts of Champaran, Muzaffarpur, and Darbhanga in the 
Province of Bengal. In its south-west corner (the Hajlpur 
subdivision of the Muzaffarpur District) lay the little state of 
Vaifalr. Videhawas separated from Magadha (S. Bihar) by the 
Ganges, and from Kosala (Oudh) by the river Sadanlra, 
probably the Great Gandak. It was the realm of King 
Janaka, the father of Slta, the heroine of the Ramayana. Its 
capital was Mithila. 

Vidifa, v, Malava. 

Vipa9 or Vipaga, the Hyphasis of the Greeks and the 
modern Beas. 

Vindhya, the range ot mountains still bearing the same name. 
It is usually regarded in Sanskrit literature as the natural 
boundary between Northern and Southern India. 

Vitasta, the name in the Rig-veda for the Hydaspes of 
Alexander's historians and the modern river Jhelum. Latin 
classical writers use * Hydaspes/ like * Britain,' to denote 
some far remote region on the confines of the habitable world ; 
e.g. Horace (^Odes I. xxii) : 

quas loca fabulosus 
Lambit Hydaspes. 

These geographical references are not always strictly correct, 
as, for example, Virgil's ' Medus Hydaspes ' [Georgics^ iv. 2i i ) 
which would place the river in Persia. 

Vriji, v. Vai9alr. 

Yamuna, the * Twin River,' the Jumna, the sister of the 
Ganges. It is mentioned three times in the Rig-veda. At 
that period it probably marked the extreme limit to which the 
Aryan settlements had yet extended. 



172 ANCIENT INDIA 

LIST OF CITIES INDICATED BY NUMERALS 
IN THE MAP (at the End) 

1. Amaravati, 'the Abode of the Immortals,' a village in 
the Guntur District of Madras on the Krishna (Kistna) 
River. Near it stood Dhanyakataka (Dharanikotta) one of 
the capitals of Andhra-de^a, * the Country of the Andhras.' 
Amaravati is famous for its Buddhist stupa, once probably the 
most magnificent of all the monuments of India, but now ruined 
by the vandalism of modern times. Some of its sculptures in 
white marble are preserved on the great staircase of the British 
Museum and others in the Madras Museum. 

2. Ayodhya, the modern Ajodhya, a sacred town on the 
Gogra River in the Fyzabad District of the United Provinces. 
It was the capital of the kingdom of Kosala (Oudh), and the 
residence of King Da9aratha, the father of Rama the hero of 
the Ramayana. Oudh (Awadh) is simply the modern form of 
the name. 

In Buddhist literature Saketa appears as the capital of 
Kosala, and as one of the largest cities of India. It has been 
supposed that either Saketa and Ayodhya were identical or that 
they were adjacent cities like London and Westminster. 

3. Bhrigu-kaccha, *the Shore of Bhrigu ' a legendary king, 
later spelt Bharu-kaccha, the Greek Barugaza and the modern 
Broach, a town in the Bombay Presidency near the mouth of the 
Narmada (Narbada). In ancient times it was a famous sea-port. 

4. Cakala, the modern Sialkot in the Lahore Division of the 
Punjab, was the capital of the Madras who are known in the 
later Vedic period (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad). Cakala-dvipa, 
or the * island ' of Cakala, was the name for the doab, or land 
lying between the two rivers Chandrabhaga (Chenab) and 
Iravatl (Ravi). Cakala was the capital, or one of the capitals, 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 173 

of the Greek kings of the House of Euthydemus, and the residence 
ofMenander (Milinda) {v. p. 130). After the invasion of the 
Hunas (Huns) in the last quarter of the fifth century a.d., it 
became the capital of Toramana and his son Mihirakula. 

5. (^ravastl, the modern Set Mahet in the Gonda District of 
Oudh, a city of the kingdom of Kosala intimately associated 
with the teaching of Buddha. Many of his discourses are said 
to have been delivered while he was residing there in the 
monastery of the Jetavana, a large park which had been pur- 
chased for him from Prince Jeta by the wealthy merchant 
Anathapindika. The price was represented by the number of 
the square coins of the period (v. Plate II. i), which when 
placed edge to edge sufficed to cover the ground. This 
purchase is the subject of a bas-relief on the great Buddhist 
stupa at Bharhut, in the Nagod State of Central India. 

6. Indraprastha, the modern Indarpat near Delhi, was the 
second capital of the Kurus. According to the story told 
in the Mahabharata, the blind king, Dhritarashtra, with his 
hundred sons, continued to rule at the old capital Hastinapura 
on the Ganges, while he assigned to his nephews, the five 
Pandus, a district on the Jumna where they founded Indra- 
prastha. The ' Field of the Kurus,' or the region of Delhi, 
was the scene of the subsequent war between the Kurus and the 
Pandus when, according to the epic in its present form, all the 
nations of India were ranged on one side or the other ; and it 
has been the great battlefield of India ever since, as it forms a 
narrow strip of habitable country lying between the Himalayas 
and the Indian Desert through which every invading army 
from the Punjab must force its way. Because of this strategical 
importance Delhi became the capital of India under the Mughal 
emperors, who came into India by land from the north-west. 
The British, on the other hand, who came by sea made their 
earliest capitals near the coast. 



174 ANCIENT INDIA 

7. Kaiichr, the modern Conjeeveram [Kanch't-puram) in the 
Chingleput District of Madras. It was the capital of the 
Pallavas. 

8. Kanyakubja, the modern Kanauj in the Farrukhaba 
District of the United Provinces, an ancient city famous in 
Indian history. The fanciful derivation of its name from the 
two Sanskrit words, kanya *a maiden' and kubja * hunchback,' 
gave rise to the legend, told in the first book of the 
Ramayana, of the hundred daughters of King Ku9anabha who 
were condemned to this deformity by the curse of the rishi 
Vayu as a punishment for declining his offer of marriage. The 
story is also told, with variations, by the Chinese Buddhist 
pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang, who visited the court of King 
Harshavardhana at Kanauj early in the seventh century a.d. 

g. Mathura, which still retains its ancient name now usually 
written Muttra, is a city in the Agra Division of the United 
Provinces. It was the capital of the Curasenas, and, as being 
the birthplace of the god Krishna, it was held sacred by the 
Hindus. It was governed by native princes, whose names are 
known from their coins, in the second century B.C., and it 
passed from them into the possession of one of the families of 
(Jaka satraps, c. 100 b.c. [n). the Lion Capital of Mathura on 
Plate IV, and the note on p. 158). Under the Kushana 
Empire it was an important religious centre of the Jains. 

10. Mithila, the capital of the kingdom of Videha (Tirhut or 
N. Bihar) and the residence of King Janaka, the father of Sua 
the heroine of the Ramayana. 

11. Pataliputra, the modern Patna, the capital of Magadha 
under the Maurya Empire. It is described by Megasthenes, 
the Greek ambassador of Seleucus, king of Syria, who visited 
the court of Chandragupta, c. 300 b.c. (i>. p. 102). 

12. Pratishthana, the modern Paithan on the Godavari in 



NOTES ON GEOGRAPHY OF INDIA 175 

the Aurangabad District of the Nizam's Dominions. It was 
the capital of the western provinces of the Andhra Empire. 

13. PraySga, the modern Allahabad in the United Provinces. 
It is the sacred region where Ganges and Jumna meet. 

14. Takshapla, the Taxila of the Greeks. Its site is 
marked by miles of ruins near Shahdheri or Dher i Shahan, the 
* Mound of the Kings/ in the Rawalpindi District of the Punjab. 
It was the most celebrated University town of Ancient India 
where students learnt *the three Vedas (Rig, Yajur, and Saman) 
and the eighteen arts.' The district of Taksha9ila sometimes 
formed an independent kingdom, as in the days of Alexander 
the Great ; but it is often regarded as a province of the kingdom 
of Gandhara. 

15. Ujjayini on the Sipra, a tributary of the CharmanvatI 
(Chambal), is the modern Ujjain in Gwalior, Central India. It 
was the capital of Avanti or W. Malava, and the residence of 
the viceroy of the western provinces both under the Maurya and 
the Gupta Empires. Owing to its position it became a great 
commercial centre. Here met the three routes, from the 
Western Coast with its sea-ports ^urparaka (Sopara) and 
Bhrigukaccha (Broach), from the Deccan, and from (^ravastl in 
Kosala (Oudh). It was also a great centre of science and 
literature. The Hindu astronomers reckoned their first 
meridian of longitude from Ujjayini, and the dramas of Kalidasa 
were performed on the occasion of the Spring Festival before its 
viceregal court, c. 400 a.d. 

16. Vaijayanti, the modern Banavasi in the N. Kanara 
District of the Bombay Presidency. It was the capital of the 
south-western provinces of the Andhra Empire. It was after- 
wards held by the Chutu family of (^atakarnis and from them it 
passed to the Kadambas. 



SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY 

GENERAL SURVEYS 

The Imperial Gazetteer of India (new edition) : The Indian 
Empire, Vol. II. Historical. Oxford, 1908. 
Pp. 1-88. Fleet, J. P., Epigraphy. 
Pp. 101-134. Smith, V. A., Archaology of the 

Historical Period. 
Pp. 135-1^4. Smith, V. A., Numismatics, 
Pp. 155-205. Burgess, J., Architecture. 
Pp. 206-269. Macdonell, A. A., Sanskrit 

Literature. 
Pp. 270-302. Smith, V. A., Early History oj 

Northern India. 

Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency. 
I. i. Bombay, 1896. 

Pp. I- 1 47. Bhagvanlal Indraji, Early History of 
Gujarat 
I. ii. Bombay, 1896. 

Pp. 132-275. Bhandarkar, R. G., History of the 
Dekkan. 
(Second edition. Bombay, 1895.) 
Pp. 277-584. Fleet, J. F., Dynasties of the Kanarest 
Districts. 

Grundriss der indo-arischen Philologie und Altertumskundc 
Strassburg. 

I. II. Biihler, G., Indische Palaographie^ 1896 
X76 



SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY 177 

II. I a. Bloomfield, M., The Atharva'veda and the 

Gopatha-Brdhmana, 1899. 
II. 3b. Rapson, E. J., Indian Coins, 1897. 

Grundriss der iranlschen Philoloaie. Strassburs. II. Band. 
Litteratur, Geschichte und Kultur, 1 896-1 904. 

Pp. 54-74. Weissbach, F. H., Die altpersischen 

Inschriften. 
Pp. 371-394. Geiger, W., Geographic von Iran. 
Pp. 395-550. Justi, F., Geschichte Irons von den 
dltesten Zeiten bis zum Ausgang der Sdsdniden, 

THE LITERATURES OF ANCIENT INDIA 

Hopkins, E. W., The Great Epic of India. New York, 1901. 
Kaegi, A., The Rigveda. (English trans, by Arrowsmith.) 

Boston, I 886. 
Macdonell, A. A., A History of Sanskrit Literature. London, 

1900. 
von Schroeder, L., Indiens Liter atur und Cultur. Leipzig, 

1887. 
Winternitz, M., Geschichte der indischen Litteratur. Leipzig. 

I. Band. Einleitung — Der Veda — Die volkstiimlichen Epen 
und die Pur anas. (Zweite Ausgabe.) 1909. 

II. Band, Erste H'alfte. Die Buddhistische Litteratur. 

HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, AND ANTIQUITIES 

(Bactria) 

Gardner, P., The Coins of the Greek and Scythic Kings of Bactria 
and India. (British Museum Catalogue.) London, 
1886. 

Rawlinson, H. G., Bactria. London, 19 12. 

M 



178 ANCIENT INDIA 

(Persia, Syria, and Parthia) 

Babelon, E., Les Perses Achemenides. Paris, 1893. 

, Les Rois de Syrie. Paris, 1890. 

Bevan, E. R., The House of Seleucus. London, 1902. 

von Gutschmid, A., Gesch'ichte Irans. Tiibingen, 1888. 

King, L. W., & Thompson, R. C, The Sculptures and Inscrip- 
tions of Darius the Great on the Rock of Behistun in Persia, 
London, 1907. 

Rawlinson, G., The Jive great Monarchies of the ancient Eastern 
World. Fourth Edition, Vol. III. London, 1879. 

, The sixth great Oriental Monarchy* London, 1873. 

Wroth, W. W., Catalogue of the Coins of Parthia. (British 
Museum Catalogue.) London, 1903. 

(India) 

Barnett, L. D., Antiquities of India. London, 191 3. 

Biihler, J. G., & Burgess, J., The Indian Sect of the Jainas. 

London, 1903. 
Cunningham, A., Coins of Ancient India. London, 1891. 

, Coins of Alexander' s Successors in the East. (Reprinted 

from the Numismatic Chronicle^ 1868- 1873.) London, 

1873. _ 
, Coins of the Indo- Scythians. (Reprinted from the 

Numismatic Chronicle, 1888-1892.) London, 1892. 

, Coins of the Later Indo~ Scythians. (Reprinted from 



the Numismatic Chronicle, 1893-4.) London, 1894. 
The Ancient Geography of India. London, 1871. 



Davids, T. W. Rhys, Ancient Coins and Measures of Ceylon 

London, 1877. 

, Buddhist India. London, 1903. 

Duff, Miss C. M. (Rickmers, Mrs W. R.), The Chronology oj 

India from the earliest times to the beginning of the sixteenth 

century. Westminster, 1899, 



SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY 179 

Elliot, W., Coins of Southern India. London, 1886. 
Foucher, A., Notes sur la Geographic ancienne du Gandhara. 

( Reprinted from the Bulletin de V Ecole Franfaise d^ Extreme 

Orient.) Hanoi, 1892. 
Geiger, W., The Mahavamsa, or the Great Chronicle of Ceylon. 

Oxford, 191 2. 
Joppen, C, Historical Atlas of India. Third edition. London, 

1914. 
Liiders, H., y^ List of Brahnit Inscriptions from the earliest times 

to about A.D. 400. (Appendix to Vol. x. of the Epigraphia 

Indica.) Calcutta, 19 10. 
Macdonell, A. A., and Keith, A. B., Vedic Index of Names 

and Subjects. London, 1912. 
Pargiter, F. E., The Markandeya Purana. (Translated into 

English with geographical notes.) Calcutta, 1904. 
Rapson, E. J., Catalogue of the Coins of the Andhra Dynasty, etc. 

(British Museum Catalogue.) London, 1908. 
Senart, E., Les Inscriptions de Piyadasi. Paris, 188 1-6. 
Smith, V. A., The Early History of India. Third edition. 

Oxford, 1 91 4. 

, Asoka. Second edition. Oxford, 1909. 

Zimmer, H., Altindisches Leben, Berlin, 1879. 

(India as described by Greek and Latin Writers) 

Holdich, T., The Gates of India. London, 19 10. 
M'Ciindle, J. W., Ancient India as described by Megasthenes 

and Arrian, (Reprinted from the Indian Antiquary.) 

Calcutta, 1877. 
, The Commerce and Navigation of the Erythraan Sea. 

(Reprinted from the Indian Antiquary.) Calcutta, 1879. 
, Ancient India as described by Ktesias the Knidian. 

(Reprinted from the Indian Antiquary, 1881.) Calcutta, 

1882. 



i8o ANCIENT INDIA 

M*Crindle, J. W., yincient India as descrihea by Ptolemy, 
(Reprinted from the Indian Antiquary^ 1884.) Calcutta, 
1885. 

, The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great. Second 

edition. Westminster, 1896. 

, Ancient India as described in Classical Literature. 



Westmin ster , 1 9 o i . 
Schoff, W. H., The Periplus of the Erythraan Sea, (Trans- 
lated and Annotated.) London, 191 2. 



OUTLINES OF CHRONOLOGY 



It must be understood that many of the dates given are only 
approximately correct. 

B.C. 

I200-I000. Earliest Vedic hymns. 

1000—800. Period of the Vedic collections — Rig-veda, 
Sama-veda, Yajur-veda, and Atharva- 
veda. 
800-600. Period of the Brahmanas. 

600. The earliest Upanishads. 
660-583. Zoroaster, the founder of the religion of the 

Avesta. 
600-200. Period of the Sutras. 

599-527. Vardhamana Jnataputra, the founder of Jainism. 
563-483. Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. 
558-530. Cyrus, king of Persia. 

The conquest of Gandhara took place in his 
reign. 
543-491. Bimbisara, king of Magadha, contemporary with 

Buddha. 
522-486. Darius I, king of Persia. 

The expedition of Scylax and the conquest of 
* India,' = the country of the Indus, took place in 
his reign, r. 510 b.c. 
491-459. Ajata9atru, king of Magadha, contemporary with 
Buddha. 
Period of the Mahabharata. 
Period of the Ramayana. 



400-300. 
400-200. 



181 



1 82 ANCIENT INDIA 



B.C. 



343-321. The Nanda dynasty of Magadha. 
336-323. Alexander the Great, king of Macedon. 
331. The battle of Gaugamela. 

The Persian empire and, in theory, its Indian 
provinces come under the sway of Alexander the 
Great. 
327—325. Indian expedition of Alexander the Great. 
321-184. The Maurya dynasty of Magadha. 
321-297. Chandragupta, king of Magadha, founder of the 

Maurya empire. 
312—280. Seleucus Nicator, king of Syria. 

The Seleucid era dates from the beginning of 
his reign. 
305. Invasion of the Punjab by Seleucus Nicator. 
297-269. Bindusara, king of Magadha and Maurya emperor. 
285-258. Magas, king of Cyrene, contemporary with A9oka. 
285-247. Ptolemy Philadelphus, king of Kgypt, contemporary 

with A9oka. 
277—239. Antigonus Gonatas, king of Macedon, contemporary 
with A9oka. 
272. Accession of Alexander, king of Epirus, contem- 
porary with A9oka. 
269-227. A9oka, king of Magadha and Maurya emperor. 

The dates in A9oka's inscription are reckoned 
from his coronation in 264 b.c. 
261-246. Antiochus II Theos, king of Syria, contemporary 
with A9oka. 
256. Conquest of Kalinga by A9oka in the ninth year 

after his coronation. 
250. Establishment of the kingdom of Bactria by 
Diodotus, and of the kingdom of Parthia by 
Arsaces. 
247-207. Tissa, king of Ceylon, contemporary with A9oka. 



OUTLINES OF CHRONOLOGY 183 



B.C. 



246. Introduction of Buddhism into Ceylon by Mahendra 

(Mahinda). 
230. Euthydemus, king of Bactria, supplants the house 

of Diodotus. 
220. Establishment of the Andhra power (Catavahana 

dynasty). 
209. Invasion of Bactria and the Kabul Valley by 
Antiochus III the Great, king of Syria 
(223-187 B.C.). 
200-100. Grasco-Indian kings of the house of Euthydemus 
ruling in N.W. India. 
The Indian conquests of the Graeco-Bactrian 
kings began in the reign of Euthydemus (r. 200 b.c. ) . 
They were extended over the Kabul Valley, Gan- 
dhara, and * India ' = the country of the Indus, by 
Demetrius (r. 195 b.c). This house was deprived 
of its possessions in Bactria, in the Kabul Valley, 
and in Gandhara by Eucratides (r. 175 b.c.) 
Subsequently, the chief centre of its power lay in 
the E. Punjab. The chief princes of this house 
after Demetrius were Apollodotus, Menander, and 
the Stratos. 
184-72. The Cunga dynasty of Magadha and Malava. 

The first king, Pushyamitra, ruled over Magadha, 
with his son, Agnimitra, as viceroy of Malava. It 
is possible that the king Bhagabhadra, who had 
political relations with Antialcidas, a Grasco-Indian 
king of the house of Eucratides, may have been the 
Cuhga viceroy of Malava (p. 134). 
175-25. Grasco-Indian kings of the house of Eucratides 
ruling in N.W. India. 
Eucratides wrested the Kabul Valley and Gan- 
dhara from the house of Euthydemus ; and kings of 



1 84 ANCIENT INDIA 



B.C. 



his house held these provinces together with posses- 
sions in Bactria until the Caka invasion of Bactria 
(f. 135 B.C.), after which their rule was confined 
to territories south of the Hindu Kush. They 
were deprived of Gandhara by the Cakas c. 100 
B.C., and of the Kabul Valley by the Kushanas 
t:. 25 B.C. The immediate successors of Eucratides 
were Heliocles and Antialcidas. The last king of 
this house was Hermaeus. 
171— 138. Mithradates I., king of Parthia. 

He invaded Bactria in the reign of Eucratides. 
150. Kharavela, king of Kalinga. 
135. The Caka invasion of Bactria. 
100. The Qaka invasion of N.W. India. 

The Cakas conquered the Punjab from the 
Grasco-Indian kings of the house of Euthydemus 
and Gandhara from the Graeco-Indian kings of the 
house of Eucratides. 
58. Initial year of the Vikrama era. 

The establishment of this era marks the defeat 

of the Cakas in Malava by a king who is known as 

Vikramaditya. 

50. A Pahlava dynasty (the family of Vonones) ruling 

in N.W. India. 

The precise relations of the Pahlavas (the family 

of Vonones) to the C^akas (the family of Maues) 

are uncertain ; but there was undoubtedly some 

connexion between them. It is probable that the 

two peoples had been associated for centuries in 

the eastern provinces (Drangiana = Seistan and 

Arachosia = Kandahar) of the Persian and Parthian 

empires. The appearance of the family of Vonones 

in India seems to denote the extension to India of 



OUTLINES OF CHRONOLOGY 185 

B.C. 

a Parthian power already established in these 
eastern provinces. 
25. Conquest of the Kabul Valley by the Kushana chief 
Kujula Kadphises. 
The evidence of coins seems to indicate that 
Kujula Kadphises was contemporary with the 
Roman emperor Augustus (27 B.C.-14 a.d. ). His 
conquest of the last remaining Graeco-Indian 
kingdom in the Kabul Valley marks the beginning 
of the extension of the Kushana power from Bactria 
to India. During the period of his rule in the 
Kabul Valley, Gandhara, the Punjab, and Sind 
were still held by the Pahlavas and the Cakas. 

A.D. 

21-50. Gondopharnes, Pahlava king of N.W. India. 

The Pahlava power culminated and probably 
began to decline under this king. His Takht-i- 
Bhai inscription shows that he ruled in Gandhara, 
and, if its dates are correctly interpreted, that he 
began to reign in 21 a.d. and was still reigning 
in 47 A.D. 
30. Wima Kadphises, Kushana king. 

The extension of the Kushana power from the 
Kabul Valley to ' India ' = the country of the Indus, 
began in his reign. 
78. Kanishka, Kushana king. 

The Caka era, so called at a later date because 
it was used for more than three centuries by the 
Caka kings of Surashtra, originally satraps of the 
Kushanas, probably marks the establishment of the 
Kushana empire under Kanishka. 



INDEX 



Important references are separated from the rest by a semicolon. 



AbhIra, i6o 

Acesines = Chandrabhaga = 

Chenab = AsiknT, y.i;. 
AchiravatI = Raptl, i6i 
A^oka, Maurya emperor, 104- 
109; ii8 

contemporary Hellenic sove- 
reigns mentioned in his 
edicts, 21 
sent missionaries to Hellenic 

kingdoms, 108 
erected a pillar to mark 
Buddha's birthplace, 67, 
106 
conquest of Kalinga, 116 
extent of his dominions, 20, 

107 
religious toleration in his 

reign, 112 
his heir-apparent mentioned 

in his edicts, 109 
his grandson Da^aratha, no 
Girnar inscription, 149 
v. also inscriptions as sources 
of history 
a^rama^ 59 

Acts of St Thomas f 1 45 
A^vaka, 152 
Agvins, 80 
Adhvaryu, 46 
Agni = Lat. ignis, 42 
Agnimitra, (^unga king, Viceroy 

of Malava, 114, 170 
Ahicchatra, capital of N. Panchala, 

167 
^irya = Aryan, 5 
Aitareya Brahmana, 54, 159 



Ajatagatru (i) king of K3(;i, 62 

(2) king of Magadha, 
170 
Ajivikas, Jain ascetics, no 
Akbar, Mughal emperor, 103 
Alexander the Great, king ot 
Macedon : 

invasion of the Punjab, 88-96 ; 

24, 120 
historians, 89, 90; 20, 127 
continued the Persian system 
of government by satraps, 
95-6; 141 
no traces of his invasion left 
in Indian literature or in- 
stitutions, 97, 134 
division of the Macedonian 
empire after his death, 10 1 
Alexander, king of Epirus, 21 
Alexandria-sub-Caucasum, 89 
alphabets, ancient, their decipher- 
ment, 18, 19, 82, 126 

V. also Cuneiform, Brshmi, 
Kharoshthi, Greek 
Amaravati, 172 
Amitrochates = Skt. Amitraghata, 

a title of Bindusara, 103 
Anabasis of Alexander, 90, 94 
Anathapindika, J73 
Andhra, people and kingdom, 

116-7, 159-60 
Andhra-bhritya family of Andhra 

kings, 160 
Anga, 160 

Antialcidas, Graeco-Indian king of 
the house of Eucratides, 134, 157 
coin of, 153 

187 



i88 



ANCIENT INDIA 



Antigonus Gonatas, king of 

Macedon, 21 
Antiochus I Soter, king of Syria, 

103 

Antiochus II Theos, king of Syria, 

21, 107, 118, 150 
Antiochus III the Great, king of 

Syria : 

his invasion of the Kabul 
Valley, 1 19-21 
Aornos, 91-2 
Aparanta, 161 
Apollodotus, Grasco-Indian king 

of thehouseof Euthydemus, 128, 

130, 133, 141, 155 
Arachosia = Kandahar, 88, 138, 

_ H°, 144 
Aranyakas, 58-9 

arkat, 57 

Aria, 88 

Arrian, 90, 94 

Arsaces, first king of Parthia, 118 

Artabanus I, king of Parthia, 119 

Artabanus II, king of Parthia, 137 

Artaxerxes II Mnemon, king of 

Persia, 83 
Artha-^astra, 1 03 
arthavada^ 53 
^ry(Z = Aryan, 5 

Aryan group of Indo-European 
family : 

Persians and Indians, 29-3 1 , 43 
migration into India, 31, 40; 

26 
progress of civilization, 31-33 
civilization depicted in — 
Rig-veda, 40-46 
Yajur-veda, 46-49 
Atharva-veda, 49, 50 
languages, 29-31 
kings of Mitanni with Aryan 

names, 80 
non-Brahmanical Aryans, 55 
Aryavarta, 50 
Asikni = Chandrabhaga = Acesines 

= Chenab, 161 ; 92 
Assakenoi, 152 
Assam = Kamarupa, 164 



Assyria, 79 

astronomy, Hindu and Greek, 

Atharva-veda, 49, 50; 81 
Athene, figure of, v. coin-types 
aiman, 59, 61 

Audambara, coin of, 154-5 
Augustus, Roman emperor, 122 
Aurora, 43 

Avanti^zW. Malava, 166, 175 
Avesta, 30 ; 4, 24 
Ayasi-Komusa, 158 
Ayodhya, 172 ; 115 
Azes, (^aka king, 144 

Babylon, Babylonia, 79, 80, 101 
Babylonian language, 82, 84, 168 
Bactria = Balkh, occupied by Per- 
sian Aryans, 30 

conquered by Alexander the 

Great, 89 
Hellenic kingdom, 11 8- 120, 

124; 122-3, 134 
its coins, 120, 125 
transference of Greek rule to 

India, 125 
Parthian invasion, 126 
^aka invasion, 127; 125, 137 
Yueh-chi occupation, 127, 128 
Baluchistan, v. Gedrosia 
Barnett, Prof. L. D., 157 
Barugaza = Broach = Bhrigu- 

kaccha, q.v, 
Beas = Hy phasis = Vipag or Vipaga , 

q.v. 
Behistun, inscriptions ot Darius 

at, 82, 84, 168 
Benares rrKagi, 164 
Bengal = Vanga, 170 
Bengal, Asiatic Society of, 6 
Besnagar : column, 156 

inscription, 134, 157 
Bhadra or Bhadraka, (^unga king, 

134 
Bhagabhadra, Kagiputra, king 

reigning at Besnagar, 134, 157 
Bhagvanlal Indraji, Pandit, 142, 

158 



INDEX 



189 



Bharata, 25 

Bharata or Bharata-varsha, 25 
Bharhut stupa, 115, 173 
Bhima, king of Vidarbha, 170 
Bhj-igu-kaccha or Bharu-kaccha=r 
Barugaza = Broach, 129, 130, 

bilingual coins, 18-9, 125-6, 152-5 

Bindusara, Maurya emperor, 103 

Bloch, Dr, 157 

Bolan Pass, 140 

Bopp, Franz, 2 

Brahman (Brahmana) caste, 45, 

59 

its literature, 8, ii 
Brahmanas, 53-9 ; 76 

language, 11, 55-6 

geography, 56 

religion, 57-8 
Brahmanism, 34, 55, 68 

sacred language of, 14, 69 
Brahmarshi-dega, 50-1 
Brahmavarta, 51 
Brahmi alphabet, 17-8, 149-50 

coin-legends, 151-2, 155 

inscriptions, 150, 157 
Brahul language, 29 
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 172 
Brihadratha, Maurya king, 114 
British dominion in India, 26, 34 
Broach = Bhrigu-kaccha, ^.v. 
Bucephalus, Bucephala, 94 
Buddha=:Siddhartha Gautama = 
^akyamuni, 22, 66, 67, 161, 

»73 

his birthplace. 67, 106, i6i 

relics of, 141, 158 

Buddhism, 66-9; 22, 34, 105 

compared with Brahmanism, 

64, 65, 68 
patronised by Agoka, 104 
professed by Qaka satraps, 143 
second council of Vai^'ill, 169 
languages and literature of, 

8, 14, 69, 75-6, 81, 105 
its disappearance from the 

main continent of India, 

68, 109 



its retention in Ceylon and 

Nepal, 108, 109 
Burgess, Dr James, 149 

^AKAS (Scythians), 132, 136-44, 
147 

invasion of Bactria, 127 ; 118, 
120 
^aka era, 22, 144, 147 
(^aka princes and satraps: 

Kapiga and TakshagiU (Gan- 

dhara), 133, 141-2 
Mathura, 130, 142-3, 174 
Malava, 143-4 
Surashtra, 147 
(pakalarrSialkot, 130, 172 
^akasthana = Seistan, 137-8; 27, 

140, 144 
(pakya, 66, 161 
(^akyamuni, -v. Buddha 
Cambyses, king of Persia, 81 
caste-system, 40, 45, 48, 68 
(^iitakarni, 160, 175 
(^atapatha Brahmana, 56-7 
(^atavahana, 160 
Caucasus == Hindu Kush = Paro- 

panisus, q.v. 
Central Asia, 26, 32 
Ceylon 1= Lanka or Tamraparnl: 
early language and literature, 

14-5 
epic poems, 75 
Buddhism, 108-9 
chakravartin, 96 
Chanakya, 103 
Chandrabhaga = Chenab = Acesines 

= AsiknI, q.v. 
Chandragupta, Maurya emperor, 

20-1, 100-3 
Chandragupta II Vikramaditya, 

Gupta emperor, 115 
Charmanvatlr=Chambal, 162 
Chautang = DrishadvatT, 47, 51 
Chedi, 162 
era, 22 
Chenab = Chandrabhaga = Acesines 

=r Asikni, q.v. 
Chera = Kerala, 164 



190 



ANCIENT INDIA 



China, connexion with India, 25, 

28 
Chinese Buddhist scriptures, 69 
Buddhist pilgrims, 169, 174 
historians, 8, 127 
Chinese Turkestan, 18, 27 
Chola, 150, 162 

Chola-manc^ala = Coromandel, 1 62 
chronology of Ancient India, 16, 
21-3, 181-5 

'V. also Puranas 
Chutu family of Andhra kings, 

160, 175 
^Itala, 158 

civilizations, primitive Indian, 28-9, 
46 

early Indo-European, 3-5 
Aryan, 8-11, 26, 28-33, 3^? 

40.6, 47.9 
Dravidian, 9, 26, 28-9 
in Western Asia, 78-80 
in Chinese Turkestan, 27 
Claudius, Roman emperor, 90, 162 
coin-legends, language of, 13-4 
bilingual, 18-9, 125-6, 152-5 
Brahmi, 151-2, 155 
Kharoshthi, 140, 153-5 
Greek, 18-9, 125-6, 140, 152-5 
coin-types : Athene, characteristic 
of the house of Euthydemus, 
128-9, 153 

Zeus enthroned, characteristic 
of the house ©f Eucratides, 

153 
caduceus, 153-4 
chaitya^ 152 

dancing girl, Indian, 152 
Dioscuri, caps of, 154 
elephant, head of, 153-4 
Kapi9a, tutelary deity of, 133 
lion, maneless, 152 
steel-yard, 151 

symbols, punch-marked, 151 
tree within railing, 155 
trident battle-axe, 155 
Vi9vamitra, 154 
coins as sources of history, 8, 17, 
19 



ancientlndian, 13-4,151-2,173 

Graeco-Bactrian, 125 

Gr^co-Indian, 18-9, 123, 125- 
6, 128.30, 140, 143, 153-5 

(^aka, 140-4, 154 

Pahlava, 138-9, 144-6 

Parthian, 126 

Roman in S. India, 162 
communities, oligarchical or selt- 

governing, 55, 77 
comparative philology of Indo- 
European languages, 2-6 
conquests, nature of Indian, 96-7 
coronation ceremonies in Aitareya 

Brahmana, 54 
gramajta, 57 
gravastr, 173, 175 
Croesus, king of Lydia, 86 
Crooke, Mr W., 35 
fruti, 59 

Ctesias, 83 ; 82, 87, 90 
9udra caste, 45 
^unahgepa, 54 
cuneiform alphabet, decipherment 

of, 82 
(^unga dynasty, 11 3-6 
Cunningham, Sir A., 156 
(^urasena, 162, 174; 51 
Qurparaka = Sopara, 161, 175 
Curtius (Q. Curtius Rufus), 90 
Cutch, H). Kaccha 
^utudri:=Zadadrus or Zaradrus = 

Sutlej, 162-3 
Cyrene, 108 
Cyrus, king of Persia, 80-1, 84 

DA9ARATHA (i) Maurya king, no 
(2) father of Rama, 172 
Daimachus, 103-4 
Dakshina-patha = Deccan {dakkhina 
=idakshina = 'southern'), 31-2, 
163 

v. also Southern India 
Damayantl, 170 

Darius I, king of Persia, 85-6, 127 
inscriptions, 82; 24, 105, 136, 

139 
Darius II, king of Persia, 83 



INDEX 



191 



Darius III Codomannus, king of 

Persia, 88 
Dasyu. 40 
Deccan, 1;. Dakshina-patha and 

Southern India 
Delhi, -v. Indraprastha 
Demetrius, Grsco-Indian king of 

the house of Euthydemus, 123-4, 

128, 133 

coins, 140, 153 
desiccation in Central Asia, 26-7 
Devanampiya, 109, 1 50 
Dhanyakataka = Dharanikotta, 

172 
Dharaghosha, king of Audumbara, 

coin of, 154-5 
dharma=:V2.\\ dhamma, 1 05, 112 
Dharmapala, king ruling at Eran, 

coin of, 151 
Dhritarashtra, 173 
dialects, 13-4 
Diodotus, Greek king of Bactria, 

n8, 120 
Dionysius, 104 
Dipavamsa, 75 
Drangiana = Seistan (Sijistan), 1 27, 

137.8; 88 
Draupadi, 167 
Dravidian civilization, 9, 26, 28-9 

languages, 9, 29, 66 
Drishadvati = Chautang, 47, 51 
Drupada, 167 
Dujaka or Dojaka, 151 
Dyaus-pitar^ 43 
dynastic lists, -v. Puranas ; Ceylon, 

epic poems 

eas-t (Eng. easi)^ 43 
Egypt, 81, 108 

English language, Mercian dialect 
_of, 10 
Eos, 43 

epic poems, Sanskrit, f. Maha- 
bharata ; Ramayana 

their language, 11-2, 72-3 
Pali, 75 
Epirus, 108 
Eran, coin of, 151 



eras, Indian, 21-2 

v. also Qaka era ; Vikrama 
era ; Taksha^ila ; inscrip- 
tion of Patika 
Eucratides, Bactrian and Grseco- 
Indian king, 124, 126, 133 

house of, 120, 124, 132-4, 140, 

146 
coins, 133, 142, 154 
Euthydemus, Bactrian and Grseco- 
Indian king, 119-20, 123 

house of, 124-5, 128, 130, 
133 

Fleet, Dr J. F., 157 

Gandhara, 81-85, 9*s 94' *33' 
141-2 

Buddhist art, 135 
•V. also Kapiga ; Takshagill 
Gandhari, 81 

Gandharians described by Herodo- 
tus, 87 
Ganga=; Ganges, 163 
Ganges and Jumna, the country 

of^Hindustan, 31-2, 93, 100 
Garga, 131-2 
GargI, 63 

Gargi Samhita, 131-2 
Gargya Balaki, 62 
Garuda, 156-7 
Gaugamela, 88 
Gautama, 57 

'V. also Buddha 
Gedrosia = N. Baluchistan, 27, 

138, 140, 144 
genealogies, v. Puranas ; Cey- 
lon, epic poems 
geography, Rig-veda, 39, 40 
Yajur-veda, 47 
(^atapatha Brahmana, 56 
Brahman, Jain, and Buddhist 
literatures, 77 
Girivraja=:Rajagriha, 109, 166 
Girnar = Girinagara, inscribed rock 

at, 149 
Godavarl, 163 
Gomati = Gumal, 163 



192 



ANCIENT INDIA 



Gondopharnes, Pahlava king, 

145-6 
Gonds, 28 

government, different forms of, 55 
Grseco-Indian kings, -y. Eucratides, 

house of; Euthydemus, house 

of; Yavanas 
Greece, Persian expeditions against, 

85.7 
Greek alphabet in India, 18-9, 

125-6, 135, 140 
Greeks in India, v. Yavanas 
Greek writers on Persia, 82-5, 87 
Greek and Latin writers on India, 

8, 20.1, 24, 89, 90, 93, 95, loo-i, 

122 

Greek influence on India, 134-5 ; 

guild tokens, 151 
Gupta era, 22 
guru, 59 

haoma, 44 

Harshavardhana, king of Kanauj, 

174 
era, 22 
Mastinapura, 165, 173 
Hathigumpha inscription of 

Kharavela, 116, 160 
Heliodorus, Greek ambassador, 

134. 157 
Hellenic kingdoms, v. Bactria ; 

Cyrene ; Egypt ; Epirus ; 

Macedonia ; Parthia ; Syria 
Hermseus, Grseco-Indian king of 

the house of Eucratides, 133, 146 
Herodotus, 83; 24, 82, 84-6, 136 
Hesychius of Alexandria, 161 
Himalaya = Himavant, 163 
Hindu Kush = Paropanisus, q.-v, 
Hindustan = the country of the 

Ganges and Jumna, 31-2, 93, 

100 
history, sources of ancient Indian, 

6-8, 15-23 

V. also Chinese historians ; 
Chinese Buddhist pilgrims ; 
coins Greek and Latin 



writers on India; litera- 
tures, Indian; inscriptions; 
seals. 

Hittites, 80 

Hiuen Tsiang, 169, 174 

Horace, 171 

Hotar, 46 

Huna = Hun, 173 

Hydaspes = Jhelum = Vitasta, g.v. 

Hydraotes = Iravatl = Ravi = Pa- 
rushni, <^.v. 

Hyphasis = Beas = Vipag or Vipa<ja, 

ignis, 42 

Imaus, Himaus, or Hemodus = 

Himavant, 163 
' India ' = the country of the 
Indus, 24, 31-2 

province of the Persian em- 
pire, 81-8 

reconquered by Alexander 
the Great, 94-5 

conquered by Yavanas (GraECO- 
Bactrian kings), 123-5 

invaded by ^akas, 136-8, 140, 
144 

invaded by Pahlavas, 138-9 

conquered by Kushanas, 146 
India, the continent: 

names, 24-5 

geographical conformation, 
31-2 

primitive inhabitants, 8, 28, 
46, 49 

variety of races and languages, 
26 

the Dravidians probably in- 
vaders, 28-9 

Aryan invaders, 8-9, 40 

relations with the Farther 
East and with the West in 
early times, 28, 78, 80 

ancient languages and litera- 
tures, 6-16 

political divisions of N. India 
in the 6th and 5th centuries 
B.C., 77 



INDEX 



193 



the Maurya empire, 99-111 
the Kushana empire, 147 
the Gupta empire, 166 
theMughalempire, 26, 33, 173 
the British dominion, 34 
native principalities, 34 
common principles of govern- 
ment, 111-2 
1). also alphabets ; languages ; 
Southern India; and the 
various headings collected 
under ' history, sources of 
ancient Indian ' 
'Indians' described by Herodotus, 

87 
Indo-European peoples, 3, 4 

religion and mythology, 42-3 
social divisions, 45 
family of languages, 2-6 
V. also languages 
Indra, 42, 72, 80 
Indraprastha, 173; 26, 47 
Indus = Sindhu, 24, 119, 126, 146, 

168 
inscriptions as sources of history, 
8, 17, 19, 21 

Persian: Darius, 82; 24, 81, 

127, 136, 139 
Indian, language of, 13-4 
Agoka's inscr. at Girnar, 149- 

150 
Da^aratha's inscrr. in the 

Nagarjuni Hills, 110 
Hathigumpha inscr. of Kh5ra- 

vela, 116, 160 
Besnagar inscr., 134, 156-7 
Mathura Lion-Capital, 142-3, 

158 
Takshaijila inscr. of Patika, 
141-2 
Ionia, Greek colonies in, 86 
Ir3vati = Parushni, q.v. 

Jainism, 22, 65-6, 69 

contrasted with Brahmanism, 

64-5, 68 
languages and literature of, 

8, 14, 66,69-70, 76-7 

N 



patronized by (^aka kings in 

Malava, 143 
flourished at Mathurs, 174 

Janaka, 56-7, d^, 171, 174 

Janamejaya, 56-7 

Jaxartes = Syr Darya, 127 

Jetavana, 173 

Jhelum = Hydaspes = Vitasta, q.'v. 

J7«<2 = Vardhamana Jnataputra, 65 

Jones, Sir William, 2, 6, 20 
[ Jumna = Yamuna, 171 
1 n), also Ganges and Jumna, the 

j country of 

Ju-piter, 43 

Justin, 122 

Kabul River = Kubha, 165 

Kabul Valley, 133-4, ^A^i ^42' 
146 

Kaccha = Cutch, 164 

Ka9i = Benares, 164 

Kadamba, 160, 175 

Kalachuri era, 22 

Kali Age, 7 

Kalidasa, 114, 130, 170, 175 

Kaitkacharyakatha, 1 43 

Kalinga, 164 

conquered by A^oka, 106, 1 16 
rise of the later kingdom, 1 1 6 

Kamaruparr Assam, 164 

Kampilya, 167 

Kanarese language, its literary de- 
velopment, 66 

Kanchi = Conjeeveram, 174 

Kandahar = Arachosia, q.v. 

Kanishka, Kushana emperor, 18, 
144, 146-7 

Kanyakubja=:Kanauj, 174 

Kapi^a, coins struck at, 133 

1;. also (^aka princes and 
satraps 

Kapilavastu, 161 

karma, 65 

Kaugambi, 170 

Kaverl = Cauvery, 164 

KeraIa = Chera, 164 

Keralaputra, 150, 164 

Kharaosta, 158 



194 



ANCIENT INDIA 



Kharavela, king of Kalinga, ii6, 

1 60 
Kharoshthi alphabet, 17-8 

coin-legends, 140, 15 1-5 

inscriptions, 143, 158 
'King of Kings,' title used by 
Persian, Parthian, (^aka, and 
Pahlava kings, 139 
kingdoms of N. India, 77 
kingly titles in India, 55 
Kongu-dega, 164 
Kosala = Oudh, 69, 164, 170; 72 

coins of, 115 
Krishna, 174 
Krishna (i) = Kistna, 159, 164 

(2)=:Draupadi, 167 
Krivi=rPanchala, 167 
Krumu=:Kurram, 165 
Kshatriya caste, 45 

its literature, n 

its religion, 72 
Kshayathiyanam Kshayaihiya = 

Shahari'shah, 139 
Kubha = Kabul River, 165 
Ku^anabha, 174 
Kujula Kadphises, 133, 146 
Kun(iapura=Basukund, 169 
Kuru, 50, 165 
Kuru-kshetra. 47, 51, 173 
Kushana conquest of Kabul Valley, 
125, '133, 146 

conquest of (pakas, 132, 144 

empire under Kanishka, 146-7 

Lalita-'vistara, 1 7 
language, scientific study of, 2-6 
preserves the record of early 

civilization, 4, 5 
natural (frakrita), 13-4 
artificial or literary (samsirita), 
9-12 
languages, Indo-European family, 
2-6 

Aryan group, 4, 5, 29-31 
Dravidian,9, ^9) ^^ 
Lanka = Ceylon, 165 
Latin writers, v. Greek and Latin 
writers on India 



legends, ancient, 54, 73, 75 
Liaka Kusulaka, ^aka satrap of 
Taksha^ila, coins of, 140, 142, 

Licchavi, 169 
literary languages, 9-12 
literatures, Indian, as sources of 
history, 6-17 

early chronology of, 23 

Vedic, 36-9, 44, 46-7, 49 

Brahmanas, 52-9 

Upanishads, 59-63 

Jain, 69, 70, 76-7 

Buddhist, 69, 70, 75-7 

Sutras, 76-7 

Brahman epics, 70-3 

Puranas, 73-5 

Buddhist epics, 75-6 

Classical Sanskrit, 10-2, 14-5, 
130.2 
local government in India, 96, iii 
Lumbini-vana, 106, 161 

Macedonia, 108 
Madhya-dega, < the Middle 

Country,' 50 
Madhyamika^Nagari, 131 
Magadha = S. Bihar, 165-6; 33, 

77j 93j ioOj iio-i, 114, 170 
Magas, king of Cyrene, 21 
Mahabharata, 70-3 ; 11,47,51,57 
NLahabhashya ^ 131 
Mahanadi, 164, 166 
Maharashtra, 166 
Mahasena, king of Ceylon, 75 
Mahavamsa, 75 
Mahavira = Vardhamana Jfiata- 

putra, 65 
Mahendra=:Mahinda, 75, 109 
Maitreyi, 63 

Malava(i) = Malwa, 166; 144, 170 
(2) = Malaya or Malaya = 
Malli, 166 
Malavikagnimitra, wi^i 1 30, 1 70 
Manu, Laws of, 50, 96 
Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor 

90 
Marshall, Dr J. H., 156 



INDEX 



195 



Maru, 166 
Mathava, 56 
Mathura = Muttra, 1 74 

Hindu princes, 143, 174 

under Greek kings, 131 

C^aka satraps, 142-3 

under Kushanas, 174 

the Lion-Capital, 142, 158 
Matsya, 50-1, 166-7 
Maues = Moa = Moga, (^aka king, 
141 

family of, 144-5 

coins, 140, 154 

inscription, 141 
Maurya emp' ., 9^.112; 20, 33, 
121 

its relations with Hellenic 
kingdoms, 101-2, 104, 108 

its extent, 106-8, 118 

governed by viceroys, 108 

its decline, no, 113-4, 116-8, 
122 
Max Aliiller, Prof. F., 29 
Megasthenes, 102-3 5 9° 
Menander = Milinda, Grasco- 
Indian king of the house of 
Euthydemus, 128-31 

coin, 153 
Mercian dialect of English, 10 
Middle Country = Madhya-de9a, 

q.v. 
migration of peoples, 26 
Mihirakula, Huna king, 173 
Milinda = Menander, q.v. 
Milinda-Pahha, 1 29-30 
Mitanni, kings of, 80 
Mithila, 171, 174 
Mithradates I, king of Parthia, 

119, 124, 126, 139, 142 
Mithradates II the Great, king of 

Parthia, 138-9 
Mitra, 80 
Moabite stone, 18 
Moga = Moa=:Maues, q.v. 
Mongolian races and languages, 26 
JVIudra-rakshasa^ 100, 103 
Mughal empire, 26, 33, 173 
Mura, 100 



Muttra = MathurS, q.v. 

Nadir Shah of Persia, 26 
Naksh-i-Rustam, inscriptions of 

Darius at, 82, 84 
Nala, 167 

Nanda dynasty, 100 
Nandasi-Akasa, 158 
nandi-pada, 152 
Narmada = Narbada, 167 
Nearchus, 94 
Negama, 1 5 1 
Nicaea, 94 
Nirukta, 11,38 
Nishadha, 167 
nomes or fiscal units of the Persian 

empire, 83, 85 
North-western region of India, 31- 

32, 117-8 

Old Persian language, 82, 84 
Orosius, 126 

pada-patha, 38 

Pahlava (Parthian) invaders of 

India, 136, 138-40, 144-6 
Pali language, 14-5 

Buddhist literature, 69, 75, 105 
Pallava, 167 

Panchala = Krivi, 47, 51, 131, 167 
Panchala, N., 167 

coins, 115 
Panchala, S., 167 
Pandu, 71, 173 
Pandya, 150, 167-8 
Panini, 131 
Pantaleon, Bactrian and Graeco- 

Indian king of the house of 

Euthydemus, coin of, 152 
Paropanisadae = Paruparaesanna, 

84, 88, 168 
Paropanisus or Paropamisus = 

Hindu Kush, 84, 89, 140, 168 
Parthia, Hellenic kingdom, 11 8-9. 

142 

(^aka invasion, 127, 137 
Pahlavas and Qakas hold the 
eastern provinces, 138-9 



196 



ANCIENT INDIA 



Parushni = Iravatl = Hydraotes = 

Ravi, 168 ; 93 
Pataliputra = Patna, 102-3, 174; 

115, 131, 170 
Patanjali, 131 
Patika, (paka satrap of Takshagila, 

141-2 
Paurava = Porus, Indian king, 92, 

Periplus maris Erythrai, 1 29 
Persepolis, inscriptions of Darius 

at, 82, 84 
Persia, connexion with India, 25-6, 

28, 81, 88, 140 
Persian (Achaemenid) empire, 80 
subject peoples in inscriptions 

of Darius, 82 
nomes or fiscal units, 83, 85 
dominions in India, 81-8, 

123-4 
expeditions against Greece, 

Persian influence on India, 26, 82, 

142, 156 
Persian religion, ancient, 43-4 
philology, comparative, of Indo- 
European languages, 2-6 
Photius, 83 

Phraates II, king of Parthia, 137 
fippali=peperi=. pepper, l6z 
Pliny, 159 

portraits on Bactrian coins, 120 
Porus = Paurava, Indian king, 92, 

Frachi/ah =:Frd.sioi, g.v. 
prtsfectus, 45 
Prakrit, 13-4 

coin-legends, 18-9, 125.6, 140 
I'ra.sioi = Frachyak, the 'Easterns' 
= the peoples of the country of 
the Ganges and Jumna (Hin- 
dustan), 93, 100 
Pratishthana = Paithan, 174-5 
Prayaga, 175 

primitive inhabitants of India, 8, 
28, 46, 49 

religious beliefs and social in- 
stitutions, 35, 49 



prose literature, development of, 
52-3 

early, 56 
Ptolemy Philadelphus, king ot 

Egypt, 21, 104 
Punjab, V. ' India ' = the country of 

the Indus 
Puranas, 73-5 ; 70 

Maury a dynasty, 110 
(^uAga dynasty, 11 3-4 
Andhra kings ((^atavahana 

dynasty), 117, 160 
chronology and dynastic lists, 
7, 16-7, 74-5, 114 
purohita, 45 
Puru, 92 

V. also Paurava 
Pushyamitra, 114, 130, 170 

RAjAGRiHA = Girivraja, 109, 166 
Rajula or Raj uvula = Ran j bula, 
^aka « Great Satrap ': 
coins, 140, 143 

inscr. on Mathura Lion- 
Capital, 143, 158 
Rama, hero of the Ramayana, 

71-2 
Ramayana, 71-2; 11, 57 
Ranjubula = Rajula, q.v. 
Ravi = Irsvati = Hydraotes = 

Parushni, g.'v. 
Rawlinson, Sir Henry, 82 
religion of knowledge, 58-61, 64-5 
religion of works, 58-60, 64 
religions : 

V. primitive inhabitants of 

India ; 
Persian religion, ancient; 
Rig-veda ; Yajur-veda ; Ath- 
arva-veda ; Brahmanas ; 
Upanishads ; Brahmanism ; 
Jainism ; 
Buddhism 
religious toleration in India, 11 1-2 
Rig-veda, 36-9; 4, 30,j;?>ia 
geography, 39, 40,181 
language, 10, 38 
religion, 42-4 



INDEX 



197 



deities worshipped by kings 

of Mitanni, 80 
hymns and metres, 44 
social and political condi- 
tions, 40-2, 44-6 
rivers, Indian, change of courses, 

95; 5i» 163 

mentioned in Rig-veda, 39 
Rohinl, 161 

Rome, trade with S. India, 162 
coins found in S. India, 162 
Rudradaman, Great Satrap of 
Surashtra and Malava, 149 

SACRIFICE, traces of human, 54 

in Rig-veda, 42-3, 44-5 

in Yajur-veda, 47-8 
Sadanira, 56, 171 
Saketa, 131, 172 
Samatata, 168 
Sama-veda, 46 
sa77lhita-path.a^ 38 
Sa'ndrokottos ,= Chandragupta, 

Maurya emperor, q,v. 
5a«a'ro/)^a^oj = Chandrabhaga, 161 
Sanskrit, the ' discovery ' of, 2, 
5,6 

varieties of the language, 
11-2 

the sacred language of Brah- 
manism, 14, 69 

used also by Jains and Bud- 
dhists, 15 

Vedic, 10, 38 

Brahmana, 11, 55-6 

epic, 1 1 -2, 71-3 

classical, 10-2, 14-5, 130-2 

Buddhist in Nepal, 105 
Sarasvatl = Sarsuti, 47, 51 
Satiyaputra, 150 
satraps, government by, 141 

appointed by Alexander, 95-6 
Saubhuti = Sophytes, coinof, 151-2 
Sayana, 39 
Scylax, 84, 94 

Scythian races and languages, 26 
Scythians, -v. ^akas 
seals, as sources of history, 8,19 



Seistan = (^akasth5na, 137-8; 27, 

140, 144 
Seleucus Nicator, king of Syria, 

invasion of the Punjab, loi ; 

20, 98, 120-1 
Shahan-shah, 139 
Shakespeare, 170 
Sialkot = (^akala, 130, 172 
Siddhartha Gautama = Buddha, J'.^'. 
Sijis an = Seistan, q,v. 
Sind = ' India,' the country of the 

Indus, q.v. 
Sindhu = Indus, 24, 119, 126, 146, 

168 
Sita, heroine of the Ramayana, 72, 

171, 174 
Skandagupta, Gupta emperor, 149 
Skeat, Prof., 10 
Smith, Mr V. A., 103 
smriti, 59 
Sogdiana = Bukhara, conquered by 

Alexander, 89 

invaded by Yueh-chi, 127-8 
soma, 43 

Sophytes = Saubhuti, coin of, 151-2 
Southern India, 31-2 
history of, 9 

Tamil kingdoms mentioned in 
Agoka's inscriptions, 107, 
150 
Dravidian languages, 9, 29, 
66 
Spalirises, Pahlava king, 144 
Stein, Sir Aurel, 27 
Strabo, 104, 122, 129-30 
Strato I Soter, reigning con- 
jointly with his grandson, 
Strato II Philopator, Graeco- 

Indian kings of thej house 

of Euthydemus, coins of, 129. 

130, 140, 143 
stu/>a = tope, 115, 158, 172-3 
Subhagasena = Soph2ig3.ser\\ls, 1 21 
Sudas, 168 

Sumerian civilization, 79 
Suraihtra, 168-9 

(^aka kings of, 147 
Susian language, 82, 84 



198 



ANCIENT INDIA 



Sutras, 76-7 ; 53 
Suvarnagiri, 109 
Suvastu = Swat, 169 
svaraj, 55 

Syria, Seleucid kingdom of, loi, 
119 
revolts of Bactria and Parthia, 

1 1 8-9 
relations with the Maurya 
empire, 101-2, 108 

TAKSHA9LA = Taxila, 92, 175 

Alexander the Great, 92, 96 
GraEco-Indian kings, 133, 157 
gaka satraps, 133, 140-3, 154 
copperplate inscription of 
Patika, 141 

Tamil kingdoms in Agoka's in- 
scriptions, 107, 150 

language, literary development 
of, 66 

Tamraparni (i) = Tambapanni = 
Ceylon, 107, 169 

(2)= Tambraparni, 169 

Tandya Brahmana, 55 

Tapl=:Tapti, 169 

TaxilarzTakshagila, q.v. 

Thomas, Dr F. W., 158 

Thomas, St, 145 

Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, 69 

Tissa, king of Ceylon, 109 

Ttiv; Ti'wes-dceg=.Tuesday, 43 

tope = j/w/a, 115, 158, 172-3 

Toramana, Huna king, 173 

Traikutaka era, 22 

Trogus, 122 

Udgatar, 46 

Udumbara, 154-5 

Ujjayini = Ujjain, 143, 175 

upanishadf 53 

Upanishads, 58-63 ; 72, 76, 81 

Ushasa, 43 

Vai^ali, 169 
Vai^ya caste, 45 
Vaijayanti = Banavasi, 175 



Valmiki, 72 

vamfanue/iarita, 74 

Vanga = Bengal, 170 

Vardhamana Jiiataputra = Jina = 
Mahavira, 65 ; 22, 169 

-varna, 45 

Varuna, 54, 80 

Vasumitra, 114, 130 

T^atasvaka, 152 

Vatsa, 170 

'veda, 36 

Vedas, v. Rig-veda ; Sama-veda ; 
Yajur-veda ; Atharva-veda 

Vedanta, 62 

Venis, Prof., 157 

Vi^vamitra, figure of, v. coin- 
types 

Vidarbha, 114, 170 

Videha = Videgha, 56, 69, 170-1 

'video, 36 

'uidhi, 53 

Vidiga^iBhilsa, 115, 166 

Vikrama era, 22 

Vikramaditya (i) = a king of 
Ujjain, 143 

(2) = Chandragupta II, Gupta 
emperor, 115 

village communities, 1 1 1 

Vindhya, 171 ; 50 

Vipa^ or Vipa5a = Hyphasis = Beas, 

93' ^30) 171 
Virgil, 171 

Vishnu, 134, 156-7 

Vitasta = Hydaspes = Jhelum, 171; 

92, 126 

Vonones, Pahlava king, family of, 

f39» 144-5 
vratya-stoma, 55 
Vriji, 169 

Weber, Prof. A., 55 

Western Asia, early civilizations 

of, 78-80 

connexion with India, 80-1 
Wima Kadphises, Kushana king, 

146 
•zvit-an (cf. Eng. ivit, laudom, etc.), 

36 



INDEX 



199 



Xerxes I, king of Persia, expedition 
against Greece, 85-6 

Yajnavalkya, 63 
Yajur-veda, 46, 5* 

geography, 47 

religioui and social conditions, 

47-9 
Yamuna = Jumna, 171 
Yaska, II, 38 

Tauna ^ \ox\\zns' =^Yavana, TTona, 86 
Yavanas, Yonas = Bactrian and 
Indian Greeks : 

mentioned in inscriptions of 

Darius, 86 
in Indian literature and in- 
scriptions, 86 



two chief royal houses in 

Bactria and India, 124 
transference of rule from 

Bactria to India, 125 
conflict with (^unga dyna'^ty, 

130-1 ; 114 
conquered by Qakas and 

Kushaiias, 132-3, 146 
influence in India, 134-5 
absorbed in the Indian social 

system, 134-5, 157 
Yueh-chi, 127-8, 137 

Zadadrus, Zaradrus = Qutudrl = 

Sutlej, 163 
Zeus pater, 43 

Zoroaster, 30, 43 



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